Hydration questions

to use whatever makes the most sense to you and gives you the dough feel that you want! ;-)

Actually, for the water / dried milk issue, it can get a bit tricky depending on what type of milk you are using.  Fats don't count as hydration, but most definitely impact the dough, so replacing all of the recipe water with full fat milk won't give you as much "water", but might give you more of a sticky dough than you want.  If you want to get precise about it, then you could look at the type of milk you are using (non-fat, or 2%, or full fat), and then find out the % water in it (using a site such as nutritiondata.self.com), and then use the amount of milk that will give you the same amount of milk solids / water.  For example, whole milk is 87.7% water (http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/70/2), so you need 12.3% milk solids and fats to equal the 25g of powdered milk.  This works out to be 203g of whole milk, which gives you 25g of solids + 178g of water.  You would then add another 197g of water to match the recipe hydration.  Personally, on the milk vs dried milk thing, I'd figure that 25g of dried milk is supposed to be the equivalent of 1 cup of liquid milk (244g) once reconstituted, so would use 244g of milk + 156g of water to match the original sum of 400g.

I believe that the general rule of thumb is to not include liquid sweeteners in the hydration, since they have a fairly low amount of water in them (honey, for instance, is only 17.1% water: http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/sweets/5568/2.  Again, it's up to you, so if you do want to be precise about hydration, then you can use a site like that to find out the amount of water in the ingredient and add just that water amount to your hydration.  That is what I prefer to do, since I find that there definitely is a different contribution to how hydrated the dough feels when I use a liquid sweetener instead of granulated sugar.

There - clear as mud, right!?!