Bread and baker's percentages

Every ingredient is a baker’s percentage: its weight as a share of the flour rows, which add up to 100 %. Several flour rows make a blend (90 % bread flour + 10 % whole wheat). Pick how much to make — a number of loaves and the weight of each (with a little extra for dough lost to the bowl and bench), or a flour weight — and every row turns into grams. On a phone each row shows its grams beside the percentage; Copy gives the list as text.

The kinds matter for the hydration:

Overall shows the true hydration (all the water ÷ all the flour), total flour including the levain’s, the salt as a share of all the flour, and the prefermented flour. A country loaf written as 75 % water is really about 77 % once its 20 % levain is counted. A link takes the levain amount to the sourdough planner to plan the build.

Convert yeast between fresh (cake), active dry and instant: fresh ≈ 3 × instant and active dry ≈ 1.25 × instant by weight, the yeast makers' guidance. A ¼ oz packet of dry yeast is 7 g, about 2¼ teaspoons.

Change the time or temperature rescales a yeast amount that worked for one schedule to a new one — slower and cooler, or an overnight rest in the fridge. It is a rule of thumb: yeast activity roughly doubles for every 10 °C warmer (a Q10 of about 2) between about 4 and 30 °C, and yeast × time stays about the same. On its own it is calibrated so that 1 % instant yeast takes a lean dough through about 3 hours of fermentation at 24 °C. Judge by the dough.

The desired dough temperature method (Jeffrey Hamelman, Bread): flour, room and water temperatures plus the friction factor — the heat the mixer adds — add up to three times the dough temperature you want (four times, with the preferment’s temperature, when there is a levain or preferment). The tool gives the water temperature and, when it is colder than your tap, how much of the water to replace with ice (by weight, from the heat balance with ice’s latent heat of 334 J/g). The friction-factor presets are rough; Measure your friction factor works yours out from one real mix.