Salt in Bittman Bread Recipe
I recently purchased the book Bittman Bread. I made the starter loaf, no problems, Bread turned out very nice. The starter recipe called for 1 tsp of salt. Got my starter going, no problems there, fed it 3 times, lots of bubbles and activity. Then I moved on to the next recipe, Bittman bread, the recipe called for 7 grams of salt. That sounded excessive to me but I followed the recipe. The Bread looked great, nice airy crumb but it was very salty tasting, really too salty to even eat. I double checked the ingredients list in the book and it definitely says 7 grams. I made a second loaf using 1 tsp of salt like the beginner loaf and this bread tasted right but the crumb was denser.
Being a fairly new baker, does anyone have any insight they could share with me?
Thank
A teaspoon of table salt is typically 6 grams, so using 7 is only 16% more. I wouldn't expect them to taste much different.
If you're using kosher salt with giant crystals, then 1 teaspoon is much less; about 2.7 grams.
Volume measurements for things like salt can be very confusing.
I prefer to think of it all in mass units. Typical recipes have salt at about 2% of the mass of the flour.
Thx for the reply.
I used a regular grind Himalayan salt but after seeing your post it got me to thinking. I weighed the salt in the salty loaf instead of using the teaspoon. I most likely had the unit setting wrong.
Trust your intuition. If it seems like too much salt (or anything) it likely is.
The very best recipes include internal checks. Peter Reinhart's books include volume, mass, and baker's percentage. I've seen cases where a misprint resulted in an error in one but I was able to correct it by looking at the others.
Morton's has a much different shape that Diamond Crystal, so it's almost 2x as much salt per unit volume. I'm sure this is true of various other salts too.