Baking ratios and substitutions

Pick a ratio — bread (5 : 3), fresh pasta, pie dough, biscuits and scones, 1-2-3 cookies, pound cake, sponge, choux, crêpes, popovers, pancakes, muffins or custard. Every part is by weight. Choose the size of the batch, either its total weight or built around what you have of one ingredient (four eggs, 250 g of butter), and each ingredient appears in grams.

Each part except the reference one has a slider. Its line says what that ingredient does; push it outside its usual range and the line says what to expect instead — more water makes bread more open but slack, more fat makes pastry shorter but crumbly. Also add lists the small things that are not part of the ratio (salt, leavener, sugar) as a share of the flour. Copy gives the recipe as text.

Choose what you are out of, how much the recipe uses, and what to use instead. The tool gives the weights and the adjustments to the rest of the recipe — less liquid for honey, a little soda for honey’s acid, a cooler oven — and says where the swap will not work (oil in a creamed cake, egg replacers in a sponge). It covers eggs (flax, chia, aquafaba, banana, apple sauce, yoghurt, tofu), buttermilk, sour cream and yoghurt, cream, milk (and dairy-free milks), brown sugar, honey, maple syrup, golden syrup, butter and oil both ways, chocolate and cocoa, natural and Dutch-process cocoa, cake flour, self-raising flour, gluten-free flour, cornstarch, baking powder, baking soda and yeast types.

Enter your elevation and the sea-level recipe’s baking powder, soda, sugar, liquid, flour, oven temperature and time. Above 3,000 ft (900 m) the tool gives the adjusted amounts — a range from the gentler to the stronger change, so start gently — with why each changes, the temperature at which water boils where you are, and a note for yeast bread.

Enter the flour, baking powder and soda, and the acid ingredients (buttermilk, yoghurt, sour cream, lemon juice, vinegar, cream of tartar, molasses, honey, natural cocoa, brown sugar, chocolate), and pick the kind of bake. The tool shows the total leavening as baking powder per flour against the usual range for that kind of bake, how much soda the acid can neutralise, and warns when there is more soda than acid (a soapy taste and a dark, coarse crumb) or far too much or too little leavening.