Advice wanted for Pre-ferment Flour indications when using a Culture-Starter
I'm upgrading the spreadsheet I've been using to be a more complete tool for getting and modifying a bread recipe quickly that includes a pre-ferment. It will be on Google Sheets so anyone can use it and I'll share it (free) here after I'm done with a few final touches. You won't need a spreadsheet program to run it. One of the final touches I'm puzzling about is how to best think about the added flour amount in a pre-ferment when a culture-starter is used. Often recipes have the culture-starter amount as a baker's percentage of the added flour, but I don't want to use that because it doesn't take into account the hydration level of the culture so the actual flour levels aren't indicated. So instead, I'm weighing a couple of options. One would be to input the flour increase from culture-starter flour (say 4 times). Another would be to input the percentage of the culture-starter flour to the total flour in the pre-ferment (say 20%). Here's a couple of screenshots (of that portion of the spreadsheet) for the two options. Both give the same pre-ferment formula. Any opinion on which would be more intuitive for the baker would be appreciated. Also, I'm using the term Culture-Starter so that people will know that's from the sourdough batch they maintain. Is that understandable?
Flour increase:
% of total pre-ferment flour
... "Put both"? Is that the source of puzzlement?
I don't know your work; maybe adding something like that would throw off the structure (either physically there's no space, or conceptually no other info is duplicated so why should this be).
David,
Thanks for your comment. Good idea. So, after I entered the post I did some more testing and I think I've settled on the "times" method. It turns out, with the % method, if someone wanted to hit a round number baker's percentage they would often have to use fractions of a percent -- to get a 20% baker's percent you have to enter 9.1% when using a 100% culture hydration. Whereas with the "times" method, it's easy to get simple baker's percents like 6 times = 33.3%, 8 times = 25%, 10 times = 20%, and so on. So I think I'll initially just go with the "times" method and see what people think when using it. If people don't like it, I can certainly do as you suggest. I'll be releasing it in a couple of days, so I hope you will give it a try. I'd really like to make it very useful so suggestions and criticisms will be essential. Thanks.
... enough to benefit now, but "future-me" thanks you today. ?
Hi Steve. I really like spreadsheets. Because I can easily become confused, baking without one usually leads to error and/or frustration. I’m not sure I understand your question correctly, but I think your concern deals with the hydration of your starter/culture. Example - 100g of 100% starter brings 50g flour and 50g water to the total dough. Where as 100g of 50% starter brings 67g flour and 33g water. Or possibly your concern is similar, but pretaining to the Levain instead.
Is the above your concern? If not, please clarify.
I may be missing your point, because I think in terms to Total Dough, Preferment, and Final Dough. It is generally accepted that the weight of the ingredients in the preferment is subracted from the weights of the ingredients in the Total Dough and reflected in the Final Dough.
I am not understanding your rationale for “4 times”. I am somewhat simple minded, so please elaborate. I really want to understand...
Your offer to share your work is generous. A well thought out spreadsheet takes a considerable amount of thought and work.
Danny
Hi Danny,
Yes, you got my concern right. In the section on baker's percent in Jefferey Hamelman's book, "Bread", he acknowledges the limitation of baker's percentages when dealing with a pre-ferment and making changes. Just as you said, the actual flour ratios are not explicit when using baker's percentage and different hydration levels. Hamelmann also says that what is really important is the overall flour ratios. So what I'm trying to do with both the pre-ferment and the mixed dough is focus on flour ratios as inputs. That's why in my terminology I'm not using dough weights (except for loaf weight) and instead using flour weights. I don't know if this will be confusing to folks but it reflects my goal to focus on flour weights and ratios.
Also because of this focus on flour ratios as inputs, I had to look for a good intuitive way to represent the ratio of new flour to the starter flour in the pre-ferment. Others may disagree and I'd like to understand that, but for me, the most intuitive way is by inputting a factor (a times factor). My reasoning goes like this. What do I want to do with the pre-ferment? Do I want it to ferment quickly and use up the flour? If so, then I won't put in very much new flour. So maybe I'll only put in 4 times the starter flour weight (which would be a baker's percent of 50% for a 100% hydration starter. Then the fermentation will go quickly and use up the new flour quickly as well. But if I want a slow fermentation and maybe even leave some flour unfermented, then maybe I'll go with 10 times the starter flour -- a 20% baker's percent. Anyway, that's my reasoning. Since this might be a bit confusing, although I don't use the baker's percent in the calculations, I do show what it is so that people can know if it's like what they have seen in recipes. Hopefully, when I post the spreadsheet here soon, I can get some feedback on it.
... in thinking that baker's percentage is the ratio of a non-flour ingredient to the total flour in the finished loaf? And that a flour-to-flour ratio is therefore not a baker's percentage? Or is it more thorny than that, in real life?
Yes, you are correct. The baker's % is the weight of the ingredient divided by the weight of the total flour. But it gets thorny when talking about an ingredient that includes flour like a starter. So, like in Hamelman's book, for a pre-ferment recipe, he'll list the baker's percent of the sourdough starter ("ingredient") ranging from about 5% to 20%. So this creates two problems if the flour weight ratios are what is really important. First in the pre-ferment itself since the starter hydration can vary from like 60% to 125%, the ratio of starter flour to added flour isn't the same for the identical baker's percent. Then if you're using a substantial amount of flour in the starter for the preferment, that throws off the flour ratios in the overall formula, but maybe not that much to worry about. I'm probably being too anal about the numbers but why not get them as accurately as possible. Having been a design engineer for 40+ years, I guess it comes with the territory. :-(
Thanks to you guys making me think about this some more, I think I'm satisfied with what to do. So here's how it would work. You'd put in the Starter Flour % of Added Flour (instead of a times factor). That way to have a slower fermentation, you'd put in a smaller starter flour %. For a faster ferment, you'd put in a larger starter flour %. I think that might be intuitive enough because it's similar to the baker's percent and I'll also be showing the baker's percent as a reference. Here's what it would look like. Thanks for the comments.
... this new setup intuitively "works" for me, a total novice. If it makes sense both to you (with tons of experience) and to me, I think it must be pretty satisfactory overall.
Steve, I am curious to see your spreadsheet. Leslie Ruf and I spent weeks designing and formulating our spreadsheets.
The sheet is very helpful when altering or tweaking formulas. A main goal for our project was to adhere closely to the guidelines laid out by the BBGA (Baker’s Guild of America). Our thought was that some sort of standardization served to facilitate efficient communications among bakers the world over.
I am still unclear as to how your sheet will workout, but I am interested to take a look.
Oh! Hamelman’s formulas were a real challenge for me. Take for example his Five-Grain Levain. For the home baker he builds a 125% Levain using 45 grams of starter. He does not account for the starter in his calculations (of total Levain) because he plans to use the 45g of excess Levain for tommorrow’s starter. That gave me fits until a fellow TFL baker brought that to my attention. I am an obsessive type and insist upon all weights reckoning.
I approach the duration of Levain fermentation differently. I am blessed to have a proofer, so I generally speed or slow the ferment via temperature.
Danny
Danny,
It's great to hear others have worked on this sort of thing. Any feedback from you or Leslie will be greatly appreciated. My goal for the spreadsheet was to be able to make changes to recipes very quickly and precisely. I like to try lots of variations, so I wanted something where it would only take a couple of minutes to alter a recipe.
I'm just doing some last minute testing and changes, like the Starter Flour % input I talked about. Then I'll post links for getting the Google Sheet spreadsheet in case someone wants to try it. Google Sheets is great because the person doesn't need Excel. I'm also going to make a YouTube video explaining how to use it because I think it's a bit different from what people might imagine how one of these would work. This is particularly true for the Mix Section where the "Adjust Add" numbers are more like sliders instead of some particular number. Using those I can make adjustments quickly to get the overall flour percentages I want. As a preview, here's a screenshot of the first sheet in Excel. It's not really a recipe -- just to show the different sections. There are two other sheets, one for converting a recipe to this format and one for converting a soaker recipe. One thing I don't have at the moment is a second pre-ferment. I haven't really thought about how that should work with everything else (like second pre-ferment flour % of total flour), but it could be an addition in the future if people really want it.
In the previous screenshot, I didn't do a good job of showing how the sliders work. Say you want 60% bread flour. This is what it would look like. It's trial and error adjusting them but I don't know of another way to getting close to what one would want, because of the fixed flour in the pre-ferment. Now the fewer types of flour involved, the easier it is. If the flour in the preferment is the same as the main flour in the mix, it's very easy to get what is wanted. Like in the example above, if bread flour is used for all the pre-ferment, the numbers would be like:
Still working on the spreadsheet. I wasn't happy with how I was doing the Mix interface so I figured out how to just put in the final baker's percent of flours directly. I also added the second preferment. But the question I have is what flours to include in the pre-ferment dropdown lists and the Mix flour dropdown list? For the starter-culture, personally, I've only been using whole wheat, bread flour, or a few times all-purpose flour. Here's the list I have currently for the starter-culture and added flour in the pre-ferment dropdown list:
Does white wheat need to be included? Are there other flours that many people use in their starters and pre-ferments?
For the Mix section here's the list of flours in the dropdown list:
What I'm looking for are commonly used flours. Are their other common flours I should include? These names will be used to designate the baker's percentages. The "Other" flours are for someone to put in something not on the list specifically. They can describe it in the notes for that flour. Are flours like Kamut, Einhorn, etc. commonly used?
Once you include a drop-down, you are always excluding something. Why bother? I'd prefer to fill it in on my own.
(More specific - I'd eliminate those drop-downs completely, both of them.)
It would be nice not to have the limitations of a dropdown list but I'm not sure how I would handle that with the way I'm doing my calculations and showing the baker's percent of the overall flour. However, I am thinking of adding another category or two for the preferment dropdown. Something like "Other Preflour". I'd then have to add that to the mix dough flour as well, but that is doable. In another post, I'm putting a link to a video showing how things work so far, so maybe that will make it clearer.
Oh - if my suggestion actually throws off some logic, then forget I said it.
Based on your comment, I'll just include all the flour types available in the Mix section, as well in the pre-ferment section dropdowns. That has 3 "Other" choices so hopefully, that will offer enough options. Then there are notes associated with the "Others" so a note can be put in as to what flour it is.
I've been making some changes to the bread recipe spreadsheet so it's not completely ready. But I thought now would be a good time to get some feedback on what I've got so far. So, I made a video showing how the spreadsheet works, to this point. What I'm hoping for are suggestions and criticisms. If I've got something wrong or the interface is confusing, I'd really like to fix it.
Here's the video link. If it's blurry make sure you've selected the HD quality by clicking on the gear icon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKR1Dl8aDEA&feature=youtu.be