The Fresh Loaf

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Sharing my bread-design calculator

UpsideDan's picture
UpsideDan

Sharing my bread-design calculator

I would like to share a calculator I created to easily design bread variations with weight, hydration and two kinds of flour.  You can make a copy of the Google sheet and make your own modifications. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-JT55KxiVjOh7JebNJcrygAGVTqySrkT_hIrVigONxg/copy

Lets say you would like to make today a 800 gr bread having 75% hydration and 20% of whole wheat flour. Your whole wheat mother starter is 67% hydration. You also want to use a 100% starter since you like the taste and want to have the starter to be about 25% of the weight of the final dough. How do you do that? This calculator can help you design the bread.

In red, you enter the properties of the mother culture and the desired final dough. Then, enter information for the desired starter (pre-ferment).

In green you get instructions how to convert the mother to the starter, and how to convert the starter to the final dough. Not all combinations work, and if you get negative numbers, you are trying a combination that is mathematically not possible. You can play with the amount of mother starter and the properties of the starter to get a formula that works. Usually, one or two corrections will get you there.

The calculator can be used also for two stages bread instead of three. For example: yeasted pre-ferment to final dough