January 24, 2024 - 6:01am
Sweet starter
I’m reading the Sourdough Mania by Anita Sumer and came across her talking about sweet starter.
she says it’s 20% starter, strong white flour, 40-45% water and 25% sugar.
I go to one of her enriched recipes, let’s say her brioche and she needs 245g of her sweet stiff starter.
To build it, she does it this way:
day 1 10g starter, 50g strong white flour, 20g water and 12g brown sugar.
After it doubled, add 90g strong white flour, 40g water and 23g brown sugar.
Im just not understanding this math. I’m doing something wrong and I know it.
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The ingredients add up to 245g total, which is the target weight. What are you not understanding?
I guess the percentages she’s using is what’s messing me up. Because when I tried to get the percentage of the total with the individual ingredients they were a different number
Well, let's see. Day one starter adds 20g water, 50g flour. That's 20/50 = 40% water. Sugar is 12 g, or 12/50 = 24%, pretty close to 25%. So Day One seems to match her percentages.
Day 2 starter adds 40g water to 90g flour for 44.4%, which is in the specified range of 40 - 45%. Added sugar is 25g or 25/90 = 25.6%, again quite close to 25%.
The starter weight was 10g, or 10/50 = 20% of Day One flour, again right on.
The starter is only a small part of the final total weight so it's exact details won't have affected the final percentages very much. So everything seems fine to me. You really don't need to worry about fractions of percentages, or even the difference between 20% and 21%.
TomP
I was over complicating it somewhere and making it worse. I am terrible at math 😣. I think I was taking the starter and dividing it in half and then changing the flour and water numbers.
thank you for breaking it down.