Saturday - February 29, 2020

loserville

Another night at league, another 0-7 loss. That makes it 1 game won in 6 or 7 weeks for us. 1 in 21? Pathetic. Heart breaking. Of course, we were up against the P family last night, who live for bowling. Uncle is out for a few weeks for health issues, so they brought in Junior as a sub. He’s the guy who holds the alley record for the highest series ever thrown there in it’s entire 55 year history; an 899 out of a possible 900. Needless to say, even with a 179 pin handicap, we got slaughtered.

I need to go back to the very beginning and learn it all over again. Hopefully the right way this time. Maybe I still have a dud ball out in the garage I can dig out and use.

~~~~

But I did have a good time talking cooking with my squad. Turns out Mrs. Newbie owns a good stand mixer, a Dutch oven, and a digital scale, and is interested in baking bread. Awesome. So I reverse engineered a bread recipe on the fly for her, showing her baker’s math and all that, and she says she’ll give it a try this weekend and text me the results. In turn, I promised to bring her some sourdough starter next week. If she does make a boule and tells me about it, I might gift her with one of my medium Cambro storage containers. They’re not just commercial grade plastic, they also have gradations on the side. This makes them wonderfully useful for rising dough in. A typical bread recipe says “let the dough rise for 90 minutes until doubled in size”, which is kind of a misstatement. Dough rises depending on how strong the yeast is and what temperature the dough is. So you can’t go by the clock. But if you put the dough in a translucent box with volume marks on it, you can easily see when it has doubled in size, regardless of how long it takes. Cambro containers are an addiction.

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Reverse engineered bread recipe:

Goal: I want a loaf that bakes up to 20 ounces

20 ounces is 567 grams. Bread loses about 20 percent of weight when you bake it, so the dough has to weigh that much more. 567 + 20% = 567 x 1.2 = 680. The dough should weigh about 680 grams.

Any loaf that uses up to around 600 grams of flour will rise with a standard measure of yeast. That’s 2.5 teaspoons, 1 packet, 1/4 ounce, or 7 grams worth. All the same amount. So 680 - 7 = 673.

You don’t want the dough to be too dry or too wet. While very high hydration doughs take you into that “no knead” territory they are a challenge to work with. So stick with 70% hydration, which makes a good dough to learn with.

Ok, so we’ve got a certain amount of flour, call it X, and a certain amount of water, call it 0.7X. 70%. Bread needs salt. 2.5% makes a nice tasty amount. Salt amount is based on how much flour you use. So the salt amount is 0.025X.

Put it all together and solve for X, then round things out. 673 = (X + 0.7X + 0.025X) = 1.725X. So X = 673/1.725 = 390.1449 == 390

This gives us
390gm flour
273gm water
10gm salt
7gm yeast
========
680gm

For good flavor, texture, and crumb you want a mix of flours. Bread flour, “KABF”, has lots of gluten and protein and gives the loaf body. All purpose flour makes a good crust and a nice crumb. A small amount of whole wheat flour adds depth to the flavor.
A good rule of thumb is to use twice as much bread flour as all purpose flour. Not everyone likes the darker taste of whole wheat flour, so 10% is fine, although you could go to 30% or even 40%. Too much WW and AP will give you weak bread, as they have less gluten.

So let’s break it down. 60% KABF, 30% AP, 10% WW. 390 x 0.6 = 234, 390 x 0.3 = 117, 390 x 0.1 = 39. 234 + 117 + 39 = 390.
234gm KABF
117gm AP
39gm WW

and the entire recipe becomes
234gm bread flour
117gm all purpose flour
39gm whole wheat flour
273gm water
10gm salt
7gm yeast

And that’s reverse calculated baker’s math. Which is completely scalable: if you wanted to make bread for an army, you’d use pounds instead of grams. It’s the same ratios, so you’ll get the same result. But 455 loaves instead of just 1.

Going further, getting into sourdough territory, you can see why it’s best to feed the starter a mix of WW, AP, and KABF flour, and keep the hydration at 100%. That way it won’t severely impact your flour ratios, and it’s easy to figure out how much salt and extra water to use.
100gm starter has 50gm of flour and 50gm of water. For hybrid bread, the more starter you use, the less yeast you add. Straight sourdough bread has no added yeast and takes a whole day to mature. For 10% starter I’d go with half the added yeast. You do want it to rise slower, to propagate the sourdough flavor. For 20% starter I’d go with just a quarter measure. 2gm. Yes, you can make bread just by baking well fed starter. Heck, you can fry the stuff. It’s an acquired taste as a good strong starter is pretty darn tart. That’s why I usually don’t add more than 25%, often just going with 10-15%. It’s enough.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/29/2020 at 11:30 AM   
Filed Under: • Bowling Blogging • Bread •  
• Comments (0) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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