Slightly related and maybe useful to someone: I built a "declarative" (sourdough) calculator which simplifies these calculations, or at least reverses the question so you just fill in what properties of the loaf you want. Link: https://breadfriend.com.
We call it here in Poland "baker's percentage" - how much ingradients are needed for 100 kg of summed flours.
Eg: recipe for "plain bread" can be:
- 60 - 70 kg wheat flour
- 40 - 30 kg rye flour
- 1.5 - 2 kg yeasts
- 1.8 - 1.5 kg of salt
- 0.x potato starch for keeping loafs unsticked, etc
No water in recipe: a) it's assumed 50% of flour weight (1 liter of water equals to 1kg); b) around 40 years ago cost of 50 l of water was less then 0.01 zł so it didn't show in price calculations.
Very often (in loafs with rye flour) there can be no rye flour addition at all - all rye flour is added as sourdough (water and rye flour, 50-50), amounts need to be adjusted.
Now, for ingradients for recipe in column one we have: 100 + 1.5 + 1.8 + 0.x + 50 (water) what gives 153.x kg of raw dough. But after baking and storing it some water evaporates so total weight of finished product is less then 153.x kg, maybe 135 kg, maybe 128 kg - depends on loaf weight - bigger loaf then less water evaporates. That number is called "efficiency" of the recipe, you can read it in industry standards books for given loaf weight or measure yourself by test baking. It is used to calculate product price/order or ingradients for given order.
That method is industry standard, we try to teach it to a journeymans. If only they didn't have problems with basic %'s... H_2O ? What's that ? NaCl ? Forget it. Seriously, what teachers in basic schools are doing ??
Confectioners do not use that method, they sum everything and substract wastes.
I’m surprised how something so basic as learning that baking recipes are ratios of mass makes me feel more comfortable and inclined to try baking than anything ever has before. It’s such a simple concept, and much more approachable to me than I’d expected before I clicked the link.
For example, let's take a typical formula for French bread:
Flour: 100%
Water: 66%
Salt: 2%
Instant yeast: 0.6%
Total: 170%My brain will not stop telling me that the total is 168.6%.
Don't forget to multiply the result by 13/12
This is also how it works in meat curing, etc world. If I'm making a pork sausage, for example, all ingredient amounts are listed in terms of the weight of the meat.
My Baking experience improved substantially for me when I moved to weighing my ingredients instead of measuring by volume. My voice assistant has also been super helpful in quick conversions from recipes.
This is how concrete mixes are specified as well, all relative to the mass of cement.
For me the main reason to use bakers' percentage is to design recipes.
Once I have designed the recipe in bakers' percentage I use my handy spreadsheet to convert this to grams for the final recipe.
When you spend some time making bread you get the hang of how things work together. How much is 80, 90 or 100% of water, what kind of correction in % of water I need depending on flour composition, whether you want 2 or maybe 3% salt for this particular bread, how much sourdough starter you want, etc.
I also use large amounts of starter and of very varying composition (wet starters, stiff starters, etc.), so even if I want to repeat the same recipe I may need to adapt it to a different starter.
So this is making the design a very easy process when it would be kinda hard when looking at grams.
I tend to think of this as cocktail math. :)
That is actually the more inconvenient way to do it. Much better is to start with 1kg end product weight and then use percentages of that. Scaling is also easier.
When you’re using a starter, things get more interesting because you need to account for the water and flour content in it.
It usually doesn’t complicate it too much because most starters are 100% hydration - ie equal mass of flour and water.
Just the other day my wife misread our bread roll recipe and added too much water to the flour. I'm glad, I know bakers math and I'm good at mental arithmetic, so the dough could be rescued easily.
When did bakers first start using decimal? Was it always decimal? I'm surprised, since most things I've seen in the "real world" tend to be fractional.
More "baker's units" than "baker's math". It's regular math.
Little question, Why isn’t the total 100 percent?
When adding butter, throw away the formula.
Similar for cocktails.
Should it not be Bakers' Math?
It’s called abuse of notation as it’s useful in practice but not strictly a percentage.
Commercial baker here. One place where this kind of math gets really weird is when the recipe uses multiple kinds of flours. We make a loaf that uses three kinds of flour, so this means a recipe will have flour percentages that are less than 100%, but that sum to 100% so the hydration percentage works.
For example, the recipe might say: Bread Flour 80%, Whole Wheat Flour 15%, and Rye Flour 5%. Personally I prefer just treating all ingredients as relative weights, and only convert to bakers math if needed. That is in large part because I wrote the software that is used on the production floor which spits out ingredient weights in grams, and no bakers math needed. It also keeps it simple for the employees, so they don’t have to learn how these ratios work.
I’ll also mention that the absolute best book on bread ever is the Modernist Bread set [0]. It’s pricey, but there are extremely well explained reasons behind certain methods, and debunking a lot of long held beliefs such as the efficacy of the autolyse.
[0] https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-bread/