The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Two Excel Tools for Sourdough

JMonkey's picture
JMonkey

Two Excel Tools for Sourdough

Two new tools:
Sourdough Spreadsheet
Sourdough Rye Spreadsheet

Lately, I've been playing around with my sourdough quite a bit. In particular, I've started keeping a very small amount of starter in the fridge -- about 30 grams or so -- and then building the starter I need from just few grams of "mother" starter over several builds or stages.

Doing the math is a pain. Especially when you're not only mucking about with builds, but also playing around with how much pre-fermented flour you want to use: 20% vs 30% makes a difference in terms of flavor and length of rise.

And then, if you get really nuts, you can start playing around with the Detmold three-stage process for making hearty rye breads, a fairly complicated arrangement that drastically changes how much flour you add and the hydration of each stage.

I got tired of searching for scratch pads and pencils to do all the math required to figure out how much flour I needed and when. So I build these two spreadsheets.

The first is for plain sourdough. Floyd was kind enough to upload it for your downloading pleasure HERE.

If you're using volumetric measurements (cups), I'm afraid this won't be much use to you. There's already a ton of variation in the weight of one cup (In The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book, for example, a cup is roughly 5.25 ounces! 3 cups = 1 pound!), and with sourdough starter, all bets are off due to all the pretty bubbles.

Any generic weight units will do, so long as they're all the same. Grams are easiest, because they're more precise. As such, I've set the default for most cells to round off to the nearest whole number. But if you'd like to change the defaults to enable decimals so you can use ounces, I'll be glad to show you how to do it.

A few points:

  • Fill in ALL the yellow shaded areas to get a result.
  • Make sure that the "Final Starter Hydration" matches the figure that you put in for the hydration of whatever the final build is.
  • Starter innoculation refers to the percentage of pre-fermented flour that you use. 20 to 30 percent is common.
  • Multiplication factor refers to the amount by which you want to increase the amount of FLOUR in each build. You need to increase it by at least 2. At room temperature, a factor of 8 will probably take 12-14 hours to mature. A factor of 4, about 6-7.
  • There's a box that lets you set how much starter you want to have left over. I did this so I could have fresh, refreshed starter to pop in the fridge if I wanted and also becuase I always seem to lose a bit along the way as it sticks to the bowls, utensils and fingers.

    The second spreadsheet is for rye breads, and it's almost exactly the same, except that it allows you to determine the percentage of rye you want in your bread. Download it HERE.

    I'm using this spreadsheet to build my first 70% Detmolder rye with whole wheat. Hee hee! I'll post the results next week. Saturday is baking day. Can't wait!

    Hope you enjoy these tools and find them useful!

  • breadnerd's picture
    breadnerd

    I didn't have time to look at these super closely, but the idea is great!

     

    I too have my bread formulas in excel :)

    One time figuring out the baker's percentage formula, and now I just cut/paste it as needed. It's handy just to plug in the final dough weight and have the proportions all ready for you.

     

    Thanks!

     

    - breadnerd

    davidg618's picture
    davidg618

    JMonkey,

    I've built some similar Excel spreadsheets. The SD Starter Calculator works on a similar premise: It calculates the seed starter (your term: mother), and the flour and water quantities for a three-build approach given a target starter quantity, and a target starter hydration. The fundemental approach is to increase the seed starter's or intermediate build's mass 3x each build, and increase or decrease the seed starter's hydration by 1/3 each build. Thus Build-three yields the target starter mass (27x the seed starter mass), at the target starter hydration. Like you, I built them to avoid the PTA math each time I want to bake.

    The second spread sheet (two versions: oz. to gms, gms to oz.) helps me formulate my own bread formulae, or convert straight dough recipes to SD, poolish, or sponge formula. It does a lot of the routine math to make it easier, but still gives the user control on what flours and how much of each to use, the final dough quantity and hydration, starter quantity and hydration, calculates salt needed with a 2%, and provides for flavor additions, e.g., fruit, nuts, cheese.

    If you're interested they are available on my wife's web site ( I don't have one) at:

    http://glitzandglitterboutique.com/davidg618/spreadsheets.html

    David G.

    photojess's picture
    photojess

    I just downloaded your starter and bread sheets..  How would one know what the target weight is going to be?

    Thanks by the way.  Hopefully, I'll get or need to use them~  but thanks for doing the work

    davidg618's picture
    davidg618

    photojess,

    How much bread do you want to make?

    Let's take an example: Suppose you want to make 4 500g loaves (that's 1.1 lbs). total dough weight would be 2000g. But dough loses about 20% of its weight during baking, so if you want your finished loaves to weigh 500g, add 20% of 2000g (=400g). So your target dough weight would be 2400g.

    David G

    photojess's picture
    photojess

    um....I didnt' know a ~lb loaf weighed 500 gms.  So now I know!  There are so many basic stuffs that I seem to keep finding out I don't know!

    And this metric stuff is hard getting used to.  I was always a volumetric person.  "Seeing" what 10 or 50 or 100gms looks like is a learning process too.

    Larry Clark's picture
    Larry Clark

    are outstanding and I'm sure I'll use them often. Adding eggs as an ingredient to the bread formula would be a big plus.

     

    Larry

    davidg618's picture
    davidg618

    Larry,

    Under "Fluids" there are three blank cells for things like eggs, orange juice, heavy cream, etc. just enter their name and weight, and the weight will be taken into account in the hydration and total dough weight calculation.

    David G

    cake diva's picture
    cake diva

    I use David G's spreadsheets.  Works great!

    twcinnh's picture
    twcinnh

    The page with the spreadsheets seems to be gone.  Has anyone these sheets they could re-upload somewhere?

    Thanks,

    Tom C

    Just Loafin's picture
    Just Loafin

    As mentioned below, both links seem to be working... if you're still having issues, post back, and I can upload them to my server for you.

    - Keith

     

    Isand66's picture
    Isand66

    Download it from the top links and it should work.  I was able to do it.

    twcinnh's picture
    twcinnh

    Sheesh.  I got lost in the narrative.  Hence, the head banging on the right.

    Thanks,

    Tom C

    clazar123's picture
    clazar123

    The link that doesn't work is from davidg618-it used to be posted on his wife's site but that was a few years ago, now.

    "Page Not Found" link:      http://glitzandglitterboutique.com/davidg618/spreadsheets.html

    Thank you!