Bread formula utility for Excel

I put together an Excel workbook for working with bread formulas. Although there are other similar tools on this site, this one has some nice additional features. Let's say you have a formula for a sourdough bread, but you want to make a couple changes. First, you want to add 10% spelt flour, you want to up the hydration from 65% to 68%, change the salt form 1.8 to 2%, reduce the dough yield from 3.5 pounds to 3.0 pounds, and increase the percent of pre-fermented flour from 15-20%. And maybe you want to adapt the recipe to your 100% hydration starter instead of the 125% called for in the formula. Oh, and you want to do all of the above without doing any math. Yikes! Well, that's what I built this utility to do for me.

The way it generally works is as follows:

• Enter the overall ingredients and baker's percentages
• Enter the desired dough yield
• Enter the desired weights of pre-ferment and grain soakers (if any)

The workbook will tell you how much of each ingredient (in grams) goes into the levain, soaker, and final dough mix. It is designed to work in metric units, but there is a helpful converter utility built in for converting to/from pounds and ounces. You can also print out a nifty form with all the values, plus room to jot down some notes.

I built this utility primarily for my own needs, but I'm posting it here since I think it would be useful to many of you as well. It takes a little time to get familiar with, but definitely worth it if you want to construct your own formulas or quickly resize or modify existing ones. It comes with an example formula to help get you started, and there's also documentation on a separate sheet in the workbook.

For the time being, you can download it from this address: www.rpi.edu/~simsc/bread/production_sheet.xls

If people find it useful hopefully I can give it a more permanent home on the Fresh Loaf servers.

Comments, feedback, & questions welcome,

-Chris