May 2, 2018 - 2:40pm
How to deal with excessively Soft water in baking?
Hello,
I'm in NYC and the water from the tap here is very soft, cold water is at 25ppm and hot water at 55ppm. As I understand it, the optimal hardness of water is between 120 and 180ppm. I notice that my dough is very wet at only 50% hydration, and this is likely due to the lack of minerals in my water.
So the questions are two fold 1) In your experiences, does soft water produce a poorer product? 2) What options do I have to make my water "harder"? Is there something I can attach to my piping that will strengthen the water, or should I be looking at additives?
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NYC water is just plain crazy, straight from the catskill and not even filtered, lucky you!
Anyway, protein does love their salt to be happy and be shaped properly (and yeast too!). I don't know what very wet is for you, but I would think that grain and flour type(protein and starch content) may have a greater impact than a few ppm off. (Also lot of people use activated charcoal filtered water for their bread with success)
Also hot tap water is somewhat more hazardous to drink and use for cooking as there may be some bacterial and chemical contamination going on from the heating process, most public health regulation deemed it as not-drinkable.
Going back to your question:
1) Coudln't tell, tap water here in Québec city is quite average on the hardness.
2) I never heard of home devices to increase water hardness, usually the lower the better sapidity (to an extend)
3) As additive come by, I would experiment with espom salt wich is MgSO4. It's readily available and cheap. You would have to make a stock solution of 12g of espom salt in one liter of tap water. Then you dilute the solution 1/100 (e.g 1 tea spoon in 495 g of water), This should rise your water of 100 ppm aproximatly and your water will be quite hard at this point.
Another thing is that you could check your water pH and stabilize it with baking power if needed.
Here a great tool: http://www.aqion.onl/
I hope it helped and would love an update.
Happy baking!
they sell all sorts of mineral drops to add to water on amazon and elsewhere. maybe something like this?
https://www.amazon.com/Trace-Minerals-Concentrace-Mineral-4-Ounce/dp/B001269PWU/ref=sr_1_7_s_it?
Though I'm not sure about the exact hardness of the water in where I live, it belongs to soft water for sure. So far I've not encountered any issue about having to use less water than what most recipes suggested. But that's just me so of course it might not be the same for you. Maybe you can provide us your recipe so that we could better identify the problem? 50% hydration is really low so I'm a bit shocked the dough feels very wet. Perhaps you can use colder water?
I can't offer much help for your second question. I did know someone who alters their house's water hardness (but the other way round: hard to soft) by changing all the water pipes but I think that's not the route you'd like to take.
why it's not easy for me to push hydration to 85+% without having a really slack dough despite enough gluten development. So I think I would try experimenting with some mineral water and see if it would make a firmer dough than our soft water.
It's easy for me to push the hydration to over 100% (even 103%) for 100% whole wheat in the winter. I can still get close to 100% in the summer unless I'm working with spelt.
I run a small bakery and when renovating the space asked my plumber to hook up cold hard water to my faucet (we have very hard water here, and I have a softener and access to softened water). I ran my bakery with very good results for about 9 months or so before measuring the hardness of all our water lines (as part of an investigation for making coffee). It turns out that I have soft water in my bakery faucet and was using it the whole time.
That explained some if the things I noticed...doughs were a bit sticky and soft for their hydration level...but I just adjusted accordingly. I also would have thought it would be bad for my sourdough culture, but it remained very vigorous. I have since been mixing a portion of hard water with the soft, and it makes a difference in the apparent strength of the dough, and I can go a bit higher in my hydration with some hard added, but my bread isn't very radically different.
If you want to add minerals...google for "water recipes coffee". As a above, some epsom salts and another common and cheap ingredient mixed to make a concentrate you then add to your soft water. I do it for coffee...
You can add some calcium carbonate to make your water more suitable.
If your flour is fortified (like all UK non-wholewheat and some American flours) it will already have plenty of calcium carbonate in.
If your flour blend is mainly wholewheat, you also may need no calcium addition.
Otherwise, aim to add 175 mg/l (0.175g/l) of calcium carbonate (=chalk) to your dough making water, to give 75 mg/l of calcium.
I would add this to your water before adding any flour.
Q: where to buy calcium carbonate?
A: Amazon, Ebay or home brewing supplies
Q: how to weigh 0.175g or less of calcium carbonate?
A: buy scale off Ebay that weighs to 0.01g for around 6 USD
Lance
But in NYC they say that the reason for the best pizza is because of the water! People even truck it to pizzerias in other states. :)
Maybe, but I make Pizza Napolitana according to VPN method The calcium content of the water is specified as 70 mg/l - approx the 175 mg/l of calc carb I mentioned above.
Lance