December 9, 2013 - 7:15pm
how to make half of a recipe
My sourdough baking results have been mixed, though edible. Since I'm a beginner, I expect this to happen, but I also am the only one eating my productions, which takes quite a while with recipes producing 1.2 kilo loaves, and 1.2 kilos of mediocre bread isn't that much fun.
So, I wonder how to make half of the following recipe: http://www.breadtopia.com/whole-grain-sourdough/. Or of any, really. I have this feeling that it's not as easy as dividing everything in half. There's this whole mysterious subject of Baker's Math I'm afraid I'll have to deal with. Could someone walk me through this with either the recipe above or some other?
Thanks so much.
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it's an easy formula and best of all, you can make as small or large a loaf as you wish.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/9346/123-easy-formula-sourdough-bread
But it really is as simple as dividing everything in half.
No need to understand the baker's math for that. It will result in the same ingredient quantities anyway: exactly half of everything.
Something I've wondered, though, what about baking time? While scaling the recipe for the dough is easy with baker's percentages, let's say taking a dough and scaling it down to 1/8 of the original... still bake for the same length of time? I imagine the time would be shortened by a bit.
Baking time: good question. There didn't seem to be a difference in times for loaves that I baked between 500g and 1,200g, they were all done after 45 minutes; but eventually it would get to a point when it would matter, I would think.
Baking time will be the same as long as loaf size is the same.
For example, if you have a recipe that produces 4 loaves at 1kg per loaf, and you scale the recipe to just produce 1 loaf, baking time will be exactly the same (you're still baking a 1kg loaf, which will take probably 40+ minutes to bake). However, if you scale the same recipe to produce 8 500g loaves of 16 baguette-sized (250g) loaves, then the bake times will be different because of the different bread sizes. Because of their size and shape, baguettes for example will bake in a much shorter time.
Happy baking!
If you know the Rule of Three you can down or up-size any formula. Either by using the total amount of flour as base (100%) or the total weight of the baked loaf.
Or you simply download the free version of BreadStorm, enter either the weight or the percentages of the formula you want to resize, and they do the math for you.
Karin