May 10, 2013 - 7:01am
Help with a bread proving basket
Hi... I'm fairly new to baking bread and up until now I've been using a 2lb loaf tin for my loaves. I've now invested in a 500g cane proving basket but mistakenly thought this referred to the amount of flour in the recipe, which I've since discovered refers to the dough weight.
Well I'm stuck with my purchase and every recipe I have seems to use at least 500g of flour, which is going to result in a heavier dough once the water is added. Does anyone have a recipe for or any advice about using a 500g proving basket?
Should I just try a 500g flour weight recipe and see how it goes? I don't really want to make more than one loaf at a time, as I'm only baking for 2 people. Many thanks
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I've been making bread with around 300g of flour lately at around 75% hydration which I guess should work in a basket designed for 500g of dough weight, recipes are in my blog posts. The new Recipe section on this site can scale recipes so if there's something there you like you could adjust it.
Or you could make the larger recipe you like and save half the dough in the fridge for a few days until you're ready to bake another loaf. Or bake two and slice and freeze one. Lots of options.
-HungryS
Hello am_123
The easiest way to reduce (or increase) a recipe is to scale it uising "baker's percentages". This method expresses each item in the recipe as a percentage with respect to the total weight of flour in the recipe. So, let's take a simple white dough recipe:
500g flour = 100%
350g water = 70% (350/500 * 100)
10g (fresh) yeast = 2%
7g salt = 1.4%
Then, if you decide to use 300g of flour you just multipy each percentage by 300 so, for example, yeast would be 2% x 300g = 6g; water would be 70% x 300g = 210g. The same logic applies if you are scaling a recipe up.
HTH