Pizza dough ingredients and hydration percentage.
When you are figuring out hydration percentages, how do the extra ingredients figure in? I know it is total water divided by total flour x 100. What do you do if the recipe has salt, yeast, olive oil, and honey? Are those calculated as well? If not how do you figure out how much of them do you use? I am asking because I have a pizza dough recipe that I want to reduce down and keep the 70% hydration it currently has. I would like to reduce it by a third or a half, (33% or 50%) Do I just divide all ingredients by 1/3 or 1/2 without changing the percentage? Here is recipe I want to reduce down but keep the hydration. Many thank yous beforehand. Poulish: 300 ml water-300 gr flour-5 gr honey-5 gr yeast Dough: 4oo ml water-700 gr flour-30 gr salt-10 gr olive oil
Pam,
Your poolish is like mine, 100% hydration, so you need to include that 300 g of water to the 400 g in the dough recipe.
Likewise, 300 g of poolish flour gets added to the 700 g of dough flour.
Final dough, then is 700 g water over 1000 g flour or 70% hydration. If you like the recipe and want to scale it, then yes you could multiply each ingredient by 1/2, 1/3, .80 or whatever. If I were scaling this recipe down I’d stick with a large poolish but reduce the final dough ingredients. For example, scale to 1/2 dough would work like this.
Target total flour: 500. Target total water: 350
Poolish: 300 g water, 300 g flour, 5 g honey, 5 g yeast (close enough to 300, Honey and yeast don’t necessarily have to be scaled down)
Final dough: 50 g water, 200 g flour, 15 g salt, 5 g olive oil
I don’t generally consider the water content of honey and pretty sure if there’s any in olive oil it’s minuscule. So just manage total flour and water and you should be good.
Hope this helps,
Phil
I have a back yard brick oven and often make pizzas for family and friends. I've tried many formulas and processes for the dough, most of which produce lovely results. The Hamelman dough is very reliable and taste great. I think that your questions will be answered by close examination of the formula. What weight of dough do you need? I can recalculate the formula for that amount or send you the spreadsheet. You will notice that when you change the desired dough weight all the ingredients change using the baker's percent formula.
pizza dough.png
If all the ingredients are scaled by the percentage you want (eg. 33%, 50%), the hydration rate would stay the same.