Weighing flour ...are you sure it makes sense?

Well, I don't have time for an epic response, but one thing you might not be considering here is that professional baking companies use fairly rigid environmental controls, which include humidity and temperature. A large scale production of that sort absolutely has to remove any and all variables that might cause problems.

Also, while you live in an area where there are rather extreme ranges of conditions, there are a lot of people who live where the changes are much more subtle. A slightly over or under hydrated dough is easily remedied by adjusting a few grams here or there. Bottomline is, weighing ingredients doesn't guarantee equal results across the board, but is a base that allows you to adjust for your preferences and then use the same numbers for YOU each time.

Weighing ingredients has several other benefits that get lost in most discussions. It allows for better communication of recipes among bakers, and allows the novice baker to more clearly see how to change a recipe to suit his or her tastes. For me, I've run into quite a few 'volume' recipes where the salt or yeast was way out of whack, and I easily corrected those potential problems. While weighing ingredients might have a few weaknesses, the strengths are proven and unquestionable.

- Keith

I guess it also comes down to knowing how to deal with the dough/experience. stuff like knowing what hydration you need, etc.

and everything else made perfect sense to a bakery in town, along with water temps and flour temps and so on, untill they expanded to another location a few miles accross town, here in Western N.Y. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, their formulas fell apart. This bakery prided itself on consistent product, and they left nothing to chance. They reallly had to scramble to make it happen at the new location. Colder water temperatures and other adjusments were made, and I am not sure what other measures were taken, but bottom line, it fell to some experienced people, and their grasp of how things should feel, before things improved. So weighing is super important at a professsional level of baking, but intuition and experience occasionally saves the day.  Ray

I store my flour in the freezer and I wonder if this is why my doughs seem to come out a bit wet.  I am also in DC, where the summer humidity is fairly high.

I wonder what would happen if you took a pound of flour and put it in the oven at low temps for a while to completely dry it out and see how much weight it lost.  It would be interesting to know how much it changed and whether it was significant.

A good question has been raised here about weighing, humidity and hydration.  I have wondered about this very issue and hope to hear more experienced voices comment on the subject.

Jeff

If one were to refrigerate the flour in paper, not plastic, the flour would dry with time.  Freezers do the same.  I won't guarantee the flour won't pick up refrigerator off tastes. 

One could put packages of humidity absorbers in the flour bin (sealed bin) remove and dry them in winter or when humidity is low, in the sun and return to the flour when needed to absorb moisture.  More investigation is needed here but it might be worth a try.  Or how about cloth packages of food grade charcoal?   Or how about one charcoal bag that fits the bottom of a large flour bin, that way a paper flour bag could just be slippen in on top and covered?  Drying charcoal in the oven should not be a problem.

Mini

the problem with storing flour in the frezzer is when the flour is moved to a warmer enviorment condensation can form within the bag or storage container which will be absorbed in to the flour.

a freas packet of sillica gell (the stuff that comes in some products to absorbe condensation) will help but it must be fresh so it can absorb the max amount possable.

Hi just loafin, Perhaps those were test bakes. I am foggy regarding the details, it was told to me by one of the regular employees, and very long ago. Ray

I think the fact that you have already noticed that there is quite a difference in the hydroscopic nature of flours due to seasonal and climatic conditions you are already there in overcoming any problems that might occur with rigidly sticking to recipes come what may.

Observance and recording variations are all helpfull and can make things more predictable. Water of course is the easiest thing of all to adjust in your formula's, especially if its a matter of adding a little more to the mixing dough rather than trying to take it out once it has been added.

As formulas are based on the flour being 100% it is fairly important to know the flour weight regardles of its moisture content on any given day.

Most of the doughs i put down will say x amount of water + or - and this recognises there is some degree of variance. 

It is a lot easier to work out if some one has a basic out of kilter formula if there is a given weight of flour rather than 3 cups and 2 spoons of something else.

Here in Australia we can end up having weeks on end with the temperature  getting over the 100 degree farenheight or 37 degrees centigrade and it is not uncommon to have to use refrigerated water when mixing, conversely it is currently winter time and we can get down close to freezing  and heated water is used in the mix.

Finished dough temperatures are usually adjusted up or down depending on the ambient temperature that might be in the proving room .

I would be quite careful about heating flour other than bringing it in from a very cold area into a warmer place.    

I was glad to find this old post because I was wondering about the varying humidity of the flour and how it affects the dough.  I was recently using up some KA whole wheat flour that had been in the pantry awhile and seemed very dry and flyaway.  It did need extra water to get the dough to behave the way I wanted.  Maybe we need some sort of probe hygrometer to measure the humidity of the flour?

When I worked in a bread factory (Batter-Whipped Sunbeam) many years ago, we could definitely tell what the weather was doing to the dough.  Of course, the factory had open windows with screens so the weather outside was pretty much the weather inside all summer long.  The size and consistency of the hamburger rolls varied with the weather but the machines didn't vary so on very hot, humid days, everything stuck in the cutters and on cold dry days, the rolls slid through uncut.  Of course, this was a mere 40 years ago so I imagine the technology has changed a bit.

I don't weigh flour anymore for practiced weekly recipes.  I make typically 4 loaves a week via a preferment, 2 subsequent risings with the first step of flour and water and yeast standard, subsequent steps a little varied depending on what additional whole grains flour I have available.  Also, I make bread at a cabin at a lake where I don't have anything fancy to work with: no scale, no mixer etc.  I've had to bake with indirect heat on a gas barbeque, and alcohol burner stove, and for fun, on open fire.  So my take on weighing is: if humidity is quite stable and you know what quantities work, you don't have to weigh and can go by quantity.  If the liquid is of standard proportions, and you know what the dough should handle like, you can get a good feel for a repeated recipe and can work from there. 

I think some bread making can encourage obsessive-compulsive types of attention to detail, worth it some of the time, but not always necessary.  New recipes: probably benefit from some additional obsessiveness re weighing. 

For beginners like me, weighing is wonderful.  I had, over the years, struggled with breadmaking following recipes using cup measures.  Since I really didn't have the "feel" of right dough in my ken, I made a succession of bricks and blobs.  Every once in awhile, I'd make a good loaf, try to replicate it, and get a blob.  So many recipes give instructions like "5-7 cups of flour," "add flour as needed to,"  etc.  This no good for the newbie without access to someone who's made bread since acoustic guitars were just guitars and standard transmissions were just transmissions.

Half a century ago now, I remember my father trying to learn how to make bread from a neighbor who made the most wonderful white bread.  It involved a coffee cup of this and a handful of that.  He could never duplicate her recipe.  She, however, never failed.

What I now find, as I become more comfy with baker's percentages and weight measuring is that I can steer my results better.  I start with my 100% flour using various varieties and percentages, then I add liquid adjusting hydration percentage to which flours I used and what I want the bread to be.  The more I learn about the ingredients, the better I can predict what will come out of the oven.

So, yes, with practice and knowledge, one can throw just the right amount of ingredients in a bowl by feel but it takes that practice and knowledge ... or learning at the foot of a grandmother.

Precise weighing of ingredients is not just for the attention-to-detail types, it's a boon for the amateur.

Weighing ingredients is, without question,  that best way to deal with measuring.  For a beginner, it takes the dough to as close as can be to "right", for the baker it brings about continuing consistency.  It also allows for accurate communication between bakers.  100 grams is a 100 grams but your handful and my handful could be drastically different.  This does not mean that great bread has to be done this way.  You can certainly wing it and throw in flour as you see fit with or without a measuring cup and get great results.  While I weigh with a scale each and every time, I have seen perfectly good bread produced by the feel method with little or no measuring of any sort.  Weigh the ingredients to start with and if consistency is important to you, then weigh always.  If you find that you would be more comfortable with a handful of this and some of that, then do so but know that weighing works better than any other method that I am aware of.

Jeff

Don't over interpret me now.  If you have just weighed some flour and happen to have a dry measure to put it in, you can rest assured that if you put the same amount in the dry measure, it will weigh the same as what you did the first time.  Same conditions of humidity, weight will have the same particular volume.  There's no handfuls of this and that involved.