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 percent final hydration while using a recipe with percent starter, when the starter is at percent hydration, we need the initial hydration to be percent.
Start with a percent hydration recipe and using percent starter at percent hydration to end up with a 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…