Not sure what you are asking here. I assume you have a recipe with baker's percentages that you can correctly calculate the hydration level of the dough.
I have at times added the wrong container full of water or had my scale turn off while measuring. In those cases I just subtract the known weight of the other ingredients from the total dough weight to get the amount of water. From there you can calculate the hydration.
I suppose you could use a soil moisture meter and calibrate it for dough but do not think that will get you the exact same thing as dough hydration.
It's much better to get a feel for what certain hydrations feel like rather than relying exclusively on a machine to tell you about the hydration of your dough. It's also cheaper to buy a kitchen scale than a hydrometer, and a kitchen scale can very accurately indicate the hydration level of a dough. If I add 700 g of water to 1000 g of flour, I'll have a hydration level of 70%. If I add to that 200 g of 100% hydration starter, I will have 800 g of water and 1100 g of flour, boosting my hydration up to 72.7%. A little basic math is your best friend.
But most important is to get to know your ingredients and adjust hydration accordingly. Professional bakers need to stick to certain numbers in order to maintain a certain level of consistency, and they must keep meticulous measurements to ensure this consistency (temperature, hydration, etc.) But for home bakers whose ingredients and environments are more variable, the expectation for consistency has to drop and that's OK. Different flours will do better with different hydrations, and I would seriously doubt that there exists an exact percentage of hydration for each flour that we could qualify as "ideal." Get to know your dough before diving too far into the numbers.
Not sure what you are asking here. I assume you have a recipe with baker's percentages that you can correctly calculate the hydration level of the dough.
I have at times added the wrong container full of water or had my scale turn off while measuring. In those cases I just subtract the known weight of the other ingredients from the total dough weight to get the amount of water. From there you can calculate the hydration.
I suppose you could use a soil moisture meter and calibrate it for dough but do not think that will get you the exact same thing as dough hydration.
It's much better to get a feel for what certain hydrations feel like rather than relying exclusively on a machine to tell you about the hydration of your dough. It's also cheaper to buy a kitchen scale than a hydrometer, and a kitchen scale can very accurately indicate the hydration level of a dough. If I add 700 g of water to 1000 g of flour, I'll have a hydration level of 70%. If I add to that 200 g of 100% hydration starter, I will have 800 g of water and 1100 g of flour, boosting my hydration up to 72.7%. A little basic math is your best friend.
But most important is to get to know your ingredients and adjust hydration accordingly. Professional bakers need to stick to certain numbers in order to maintain a certain level of consistency, and they must keep meticulous measurements to ensure this consistency (temperature, hydration, etc.) But for home bakers whose ingredients and environments are more variable, the expectation for consistency has to drop and that's OK. Different flours will do better with different hydrations, and I would seriously doubt that there exists an exact percentage of hydration for each flour that we could qualify as "ideal." Get to know your dough before diving too far into the numbers.