January 1, 2012 - 9:19am
rustic loaves for one person
I'm trying to find recipes for small rustic loaves of bread. I don't want 5#'s of dough to split up and turn into mini loaves but rather a small lump of dough for one small loaf of bread. Any recipes sought, and tips appreciated for altering a recipe to make it smaller. I'm a novice baker, artist by profession who prefers to keep it simple.
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Hey asunda,
If you're looking for a recipe to scale, use baker's math. Start with the amount of flour in the recipe, that will be 100%. Every other ingredient will be a percentage of the flour's weight, so from there we move on to water. I like to use about 60%. Then add salt, 2%. Yeast will be about 1-2% I believe, I have to admit I typically do that by eye.
So if we're using this method:
I start with 10 ounces flour
Add 6 ounces water.
Add .2 ounces salt.
Add .1-.2 ounces yeast.
This method can be scaled with ease since it's all based on how much flour you want to use/how much you want to bake. If you're looking for information on the amounts you should aim for, try http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/23352/dough-ball-sizes-common-bread-shapes
Once you're armed with an understanding of baker's math, it's easy to make your own recipes or to convert existing recipes (at least recipes written by weight) into the system and scale them to your liking.
Susan of San Diego and Magic Bowl fame, shared her small sourdough loaf formula, it is a good one for learning. The challenge Eric set up includes the formula in Susan's post of Oct 1, 2009 and all the comments in the thread help.
This post about the challenge echos G-man's baker's percent comment above. The follow up post is helpful too.