Bread Calculator

A Verbal Calculator for Bread Ratios

…I often find thinking about the proportions of hydration in recipes to be pretty confusing. To remedy this, I always try to think of a recipe in the terms used below.

I used Tangle.js to make each sentence customizable (drag over each number to change it).

To arrive at 79.1 percent final hydration while using a recipe with 20

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percent starter, when the starter is at 100

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percent hydration, we need the initial hydration to be 75

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percent.

Start with a 70.0 percent hydration recipe and using 20

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percent starter at 100

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percent hydration to end up with a 75

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percent hydration loaf.

Equations:

…solving the other way around:

Definitions:

$\large fdh =$ final dough hydration
$\large h =$ hydration (the ratio of water to total flour in the recipe)
$\large sh =$ starter hydration (the ratio of water to flour in the starter)
$\large sp =$ starter percentage (the ratio of starter to flour in the recipe)

Notes

This page is just a sketchpad. I’m using Bret Victor’s Tangle.js and the hydration math here (no, I haven’t double-checked it yet!).

What I want is an easy way to understand in plain terms what the starting and finishing hydrations of a bread are. Another idea would be to make a page like this for beer gravities…