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Submitted by JMonkey on October 20, 2006 - 1:21pm Two Excel Tools for SourdoughTwo new tools: 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: 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!
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very cool!
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
excel charts
Nice job on the excel chart. I wondered if you knew how to make a chart where if you altered the hydration in a given recipe, excel could recalculate the flour needed per loaf so that the desired final weight would stay the same (920g for example)? If you want I could send you a file that illustrates what I am talking about. Does this make any sense?
Re: excel charts
Not sure you'd want to use the flour content to alter dough hydration. Doing so would then alter the percentages/ratio of ALL the other ingredients! It's much better to alter the amount of water, unless changing the other ingredient ratios is desired...
At any rate, let's use water as the example, assuming all you want to do is to change the hydration.
Let's say you have 1500g of dough to build, which is going to include approx. 750g of flour and 474g of water. 474 divided by 750 = 0.632. We move the decimal over two places to the right and get a hydration of 63.2% (if you are using any type of poolish/starter, that needs to be factored into a final hydration percentage. It will raise it depending on the hydration percentage of the poolish/starter used. That's beyond the scope of this simple response).
Ok, so we have 750g flour, 474g water and that worked out to 63.2% hydration. Let's bump that up to 65%. 750g times .65 = 487.5g, so we would need to raise our amount of water from 474g to 487.5g. To check our math, let's do 487.5 divided by 750 and we get exactly 0.65 or 65%.
We have now raised the hydration of the dough without altering the other ingredient's relationship to the 100% flour. You can use the exact same math formula to alter the flour weight against the water, but to keep the entire recipe formula intact, you would then need to re-calculate all the other ingredient weights. That's a lot more work. Hope that helps!
- Keith
Nice job...
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.
question
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
target bread weight
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
thanks
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.
David, your spread sheets
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
There is a place for other liquids
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
David G's spreadsheets
I use David G's spreadsheets. Works great!
That's fantastic. I've been
That's fantastic. I've been working on developing a "feel" for my bread, including the starter - meaning I am judging activity levels and how much to add by eye and nose. So far this has been working really well, but getting it down to a formula is probably something I really should be working towards.
Thank you so much for sharing this.