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Creating New Formulas - Rules of Thumb

hydestone's picture
hydestone

Creating New Formulas - Rules of Thumb

Hi All:

I was going to track back through and calculate ratios from some of my favorite formulas to try and establish some rules of thumb for creating new formulas...but figured many of you have probably already done so, so I figured I’d ask you to share!

For instance, if I want to add some oats, flax, barley, millet, and dates to a recipe - how much do I reduce the flour?  Or do I just add more water. 

Any advice or tips are appreciated!

Thanks folks.

yozzause's picture
yozzause

Hi Hydestone

I usually make a dough to either suit  certain size pans or sheets so if i am working out my own formula or following someone else's it's quite easy to do. For instance if you are wanting to add 10% oats to a formula you add all the percentages together   so say Flour 100%, Water 75%, Salt 2%, Yeast 2%, butter 2% and then i want OATS @ 10% it then equals 191%.        So now if i wish to make a 750g dough RECIPE because it fits my pan or banneton  i divide 750 by 191 which will give me the value of 1% in this case  3.926 which i would round to 3.93 then just go back through the formula and put values to each ingredients formula percentage. Flour 393g, Water 295g, salt yeast and butter  all 8g each and oats 39g. AS a Double  Check add all the weights up and you should be very close to that Target in this case its 751.  so regardless the size of the dough you require it will always have the correct ratios.

Kind regards Derek

idaveindy's picture
idaveindy

Add-ins sometimes/usually need to be soaked, because they will "rob" some water from the flour after mixng.

This guy did some experiments and came up with some figures.  Read carefully what he intends it for, soaking, not putting the add-ins dry into the initial mix.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/61245/soaker-ingredient-hydration-percents-some-data

Hope this helps.

foodforthought's picture
foodforthought

I’m kind of in Derek’s camp with a few adjustments. The BBGA sez you should treat hydrated soakers as “hydration neutral” which I do, sort of.

Like Derek, I start with how much dough I need for some number of finished loaves. Last week, I wanted 1900 g of dough for 2 loaves of Approachable Whole Wheat sandwich bread. So before calculating the required flour, I subtracted the 240 grams of hydrated wheat berries, rolled oats and raisins that I wanted to use. So my targetdough weight less soakers was now 1660 g.

I think the BBGA logic is that the soakers are just held in a matrix of dough and don’t add anything but weight to the final dough. That said, the “hydration neutral” discussion has been rather passionately discussed here at times, so I would always plan to

  1. Hydrate soakers well in advance of mixing dough
  2. Strain/drain hydrated materials well (I cooked my wheat berries day before and left them in a strainer overnight)
  3. Be prepared to cautiously add flour if dough seems overly wet. This is an experience thing. (In my example, I suspect that the dry rolled oats may have balanced the moisture contributed by the hydrated wheat berries, BBGA guideline worked with no adjustments required.)

Good luck,

Phil

hydestone's picture
hydestone

This is great information, thanks for sharing.

That guy did some serious research and put together one hell of a spreadsheet!

I’ll throw together a simple spreadsheet to help calculate weights etc.  I typically write everything down on little sheets of paper that get lost in the shuffle.  It will be nice to have them saved in an excel file or google sheet. 

yozzause's picture
yozzause

Even a good sized exercise book as long as you record what you did and when , and follow up with self analysis what you liked what you might do differently, even award yourself some stars or points out of 10 it all helps when you revisit later down the track. especially as you get older! unfortunately. I am just amazed at my young grand daughter's memory and the retention. Just lately i am finding i need to make notes on things like chain saw repairs (now why did i pull  this apart?)