Preferment ingredient amounts - in or out of formulas?
When I took up baking a few years back, i did it with a bread machine. After a couple of months, I converted all my recipes to formulas and optimized the formulas for the size of the bread machine pan. Since the pan size is a constant, when I began using preferments, I split the baking process into two steps. Step 1 is to have the machine mix the preferment. Step 2 is to add the remaining ingredients to the machine and use the timer to set the finish time - 12 or 13 hours from when the preferment was mixed and the remaining ingredients added. This method produces excellent bread.
Lately I've been making most of my bread by hand, but I've continued "subtracting" the preferment flour and water from my final dough calculations. Baking at my house is all about loaf size - the loaf has to be a size my wife and I can eat at a single meal, and everything has to "fit" my baking equipment. So, for example, if I'm making a ciabatta with 200g of total flour, my poolish formula is 100g each of flour and water, and the dough is the remaining 100g of flour, any remaining water, etc.
I noticed that Ciril Hitz does not include the flour and water in preferments in his formula calculations. This caused me some very salty loaves - I was calculating salt as a percentage of total flour, he was calculating as percentage of dough flour. If you do it the Hitz way, how do you figure out how much preferment to add to a dough?
BTW, I keep a lot of notes when I bake, so my adapted process works very well for me. Just curious how others do it. Something tells me I'm doing it "wrong."