Baker's Math

Math?! Yes! Professional bakers dont usually talk about recipes, but rather
about formulas. Bread is all about proportions, and baker's math is a way of
breaking down ingredients into these proportions so that you can scale up or
down as needed. It also makes baking much easier because, once you understand
the basic proportions, you can freely mix and match ingredients to invent all
kinds of breads on your own.
It's not necessary to learn baker's math to bake good bread, of course, but it can
expand your ability to mix and match ingredients and break free of recipes to
create your own formulas.
In baker's math, every ingredient is expressed in terms of the flour weight,
which is always expressed as 100 percent. For example, let's take a typical
formula for French bread:
* Flour: 100%
* Water: 66%
* Salt: 2%
* Instant yeast: 0.6%
* Total: 170%
So, lets say weve got 500 grams of flour. If I wanted to make French bread,
heres how Id figure out the weight of the other ingredients
Water: 500 * 0.66 = 330 grams
Salt: 500 * .02 = 10 grams
Instant yeast: 500 *.006 = 3 grams
We can also first decide how much dough we want, and work backwards. Let's
say we want to make 1 kilogram of dough. First, we need to figure out how
much flour we need. To do this, we divide the total of all the ingredient
percentages added up (170% = 1.7) into the total weight of the dough:
1000 grams / 1.7 = 588 grams of flour (rounded to nearest gram).
Now that we know the flour weight, we figure out the weight of each of the
ingredients by multiplying their percentage by the flour weight, just as we did
above.
* Water = 0.66 * 588 = 388 grams
* Salt = .02 * 588 = 12 grams (rounded)
* Instant yeast = .006 * 588 = 6 grams (rounded)