The Fresh Loaf

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How to scale up a dough recipe?

rossettidarling's picture
rossettidarling

How to scale up a dough recipe?

Hello baker friends!

I have been trying to scale up my bagel dough recipe, from a "home" recipe, to now producing 100's for our business. I have never been trained in ANY formal sense as a baker and have no understanding of "real" %'s, how to scale up., etc.. Can anyone point me in the right direction of a simple way to start that process?

 

I am having major consistency struggles since increasing production and I am wondering if it is that I am using far to much instant yeast now, which may be creating chaos?

 

If anyone has ideas or helpful resources, please let me know!

 

Thank you so much!!

 

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

it is easier to scale up. Metric even better.   Recipe?

What kind of chaos?

trailrunner's picture
trailrunner

That would be a huge factor if indeed you are scaling up in a uniform matter with all ingredients. The flour/ water/ salt indeed are proportional but the yeast is absolutely not proportional. I regularly use 1/4-1/2 tsp of ADY in place of the amounts specified in any recipe I use that is yeast based. Many recipes call for 1-2 “ packets” each of which contains 2 1/4 tsp ! They are SO off the mark . All that said Mini is correct that weights in grams are way easier to scale up or down . You put the weight you want on top and the weight of your original recipe on the bottom and that number is what you multiply each ingredient by … except the yeast. 

So start by making your original recipe for bagels and weigh on a gram / kg scale each ingredient. Now scale up to double using the fraction method stated above and then quadruple. For the yeast amount start by using 1/4 the amount and you will likely find you can go even less. 

Report back. c

albacore's picture
albacore

Bear in mind that your recipe may have worked fine at home because the dough quantities were small and the dough lost heat easily, so slowing things down.

Scale up and you have a big mass of dough that keeps the heat in and so maintains temperature more; besides, bakeries are probably going to be warmer than kitchens.

As a guide, DiMuzio has a bagel recipe in his book with 0.4% instant yeast (4g per 1000g flour), desired dough temp 74F.

Lance

yozzause's picture
yozzause

Once you have a formula that you like  you need to express it in bakers percentage with the flour being 100% so what ever the amount of flour is divide that by 100 and you have the value of 1%  express each of the ingredients by the 1% value and you will get a formula with all the ingredients expressed as percentages. Now and this is just an example  you know that you want enough dough for say 235 bagels and the bagels will scale at 85g  the amount of dough required is 235 x 85 = 19975g in this case its easy to round up  to 20000g.

You then add all the percentages up in the formula you previously   worked out and say that comes to 197%  then you divide the amount of dough required 20000g by the total percentages 197 which in this case equals 107.5228426--- lets call that 107.6. you then apply that figure 107.6 to each of the ingredient values so flour would be 100% x 107.6 = 10760g , salt @ 2% x 107.6  = 215.2g and so on . as a double check add up all the ingredient values and they should be the same as the desired amount of dough. As others have said the yeast is likely to be the one thing that can be reduced a little the bigger the dough gets and also watch the temperatures as they also tend to rise with more friction during mixing Keep a dough book and write everything down as you go both for reference and as a guide to future production. 

Kind regards Derek 

gavinc's picture
gavinc

I use bakers percent. I create a spreadsheet for each recipe I make regularly and recalculate for my size bannetons,

Easy once you get the gist. I learned if from Hamelman, but there is a good tutorial at: Baker's Percentage | King Arthur Baking

Cheers,

Gavin.

anton's picture
anton

If you can post your recipe  perhaps it can be converted in Bakers Percent to allow you to adjust the ingredients to suit.