Creating New Formulas - Rules of Thumb

Hi Hydestone

I usually make a dough to either suit  certain size pans or sheets so if i am working out my own formula or following someone else's it's quite easy to do. For instance if you are wanting to add 10% oats to a formula you add all the percentages together   so say Flour 100%, Water 75%, Salt 2%, Yeast 2%, butter 2% and then i want OATS @ 10% it then equals 191%.        So now if i wish to make a 750g dough RECIPE because it fits my pan or banneton  i divide 750 by 191 which will give me the value of 1% in this case  3.926 which i would round to 3.93 then just go back through the formula and put values to each ingredients formula percentage. Flour 393g, Water 295g, salt yeast and butter  all 8g each and oats 39g. AS a Double  Check add all the weights up and you should be very close to that Target in this case its 751.  so regardless the size of the dough you require it will always have the correct ratios.

Kind regards Derek

Add-ins sometimes/usually need to be soaked, because they will "rob" some water from the flour after mixng.

This guy did some experiments and came up with some figures.  Read carefully what he intends it for, soaking, not putting the add-ins dry into the initial mix.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/61245/soaker-ingredient-hydration-percents-some-data

Hope this helps.

I’m kind of in Derek’s camp with a few adjustments. The BBGA sez you should treat hydrated soakers as “hydration neutral” which I do, sort of.

Like Derek, I start with how much dough I need for some number of finished loaves. Last week, I wanted 1900 g of dough for 2 loaves of Approachable Whole Wheat sandwich bread. So before calculating the required flour, I subtracted the 240 grams of hydrated wheat berries, rolled oats and raisins that I wanted to use. So my targetdough weight less soakers was now 1660 g.

I think the BBGA logic is that the soakers are just held in a matrix of dough and don’t add anything but weight to the final dough. That said, the “hydration neutral” discussion has been rather passionately discussed here at times, so I would always plan to

1. Hydrate soakers well in advance of mixing dough
2. Strain/drain hydrated materials well (I cooked my wheat berries day before and left them in a strainer overnight)
3. Be prepared to cautiously add flour if dough seems overly wet. This is an experience thing. (In my example, I suspect that the dry rolled oats may have balanced the moisture contributed by the hydrated wheat berries, BBGA guideline worked with no adjustments required.)

Good luck,

Phil