I'm looking at making a bakers flour-wholemeal flour loaf but adding in honey and greek yogurt. Normally I calculate hydration as water in starter plus water. in some of my loaves I use a bit of honey but have never factored in the water content of honey. I'd appreciate opinions as to whether 18% water for honey and 75% water for greek yogurt are reasonable percentages to work with.
Honey is ok, but according to my "research", Greek yogurt is between 80 & 85% water by weight.
I’ve made a point of rewriting most of the bread formulas I use to include honey, EVOO and yogurt ( or buttermilk ).
For 1000g flours I typically use 30-40g of each so 90-120g of Trinity. I subtract that total figure from the water called for in the formula.
I’ve never calculated the hydration of a bread formula that I make. I don’t need to I go by feel. So far in all these years that has worked.
Just take out the water sub your products and if it feels too dry add in some more water. Very unlikely it will feel too wet but you can hold back some water as well. It’s quite easy and make a notation of what you did for future reference. c
When I want to know the water or fat content of an ingredient, I tend to check the USDA's Food Data Central first. It's a database of information from laboratory analyses of foods.
You type in the food you're looking for and it will bring you to a search results page. Often you'll see what you're looking for listed right away, but sometimes you have to select another tab of results. The tabs are a little hard to spot; they're right under the banner picture, near the top, and the tabs are labeled Foundation Foods (#), SR Legacy Foods (#), etc. I've circled them in this screenshot.
Here's a result for honey, listed under SR Legacy Foods. Above the chart is a drop-down menu for Portion, make sure that is set to 100g. Then you can look through the chart to find what you're looking for; water has always been listed at the top for the foods I've looked at. Here you can see that the water content of the honey analyzed here was 17.1g, so given a 100g portion this honey was 17.1% water. Here's an image showing where to find the Portion selection.
That database won't always have what you're looking for, but when it does it should get you to a reasonably accurate value for water and fat content.
You can try it out yourself by searching for Greek yogurt. Try to find an entry that matches the fat content of the yogurt you'll be using for the most accuracy with water content, because it will vary based on how much fat is in the yogurt.
Bees wont cap honey cells until the water content is 17% (clever creatures) interestingly its so that it wont ferment at that level. i however consider the amount of honey as liquid and deduct that amount as i do also with egg rather than using part measures of an egg,
I'll second the FoodData Central database as a great resource.
For final product (aka your bread) nutritional analysis, I'll add that Cronometer is an app that links to the USDA and some international databases, as well as user-provided data. You can use it to calculate the nutritional composition in your recipes.
Whatever it says is fine. Just adjust as needed. Enjoy!
That USDA Database is a real asset. The whole milk greek yogurt entry was 81.3% which Is about where Moe C was in the first post. Its AM, I'm up and my start is ready so its time to make bread. Cheers!
OK decided to experiment with an addition of greek yogurt on my (somewhat) rye bread recipe. I spreadsheet my sourdough recipes so I can easily adjust to the quantity of dough I want. In this instance I decided to go with 100g of whole milk Greek yogurt which based on the USDA table should result in ~20% solids and ~80% water. Add the solids as a new inclusion and subtract water from the rye recipe's previous required water. I have never bothered about how much water in the honey before and I didn't this time either. I'll see how this goes tomorrow after I bake. Maybe this will help someone else.