Wild Yeast

This final installment in the Baker’s Percentage tutorial series concerns breads that are made with preferments. (A preferment is a poolish, biga, sponge, sourdough starter, etc., where a portion of the flour is fermented prior to the mixing of the final dough.) If you missed the first three parts, you’ll want to read them before diving into this one. An index of the entire tutorial is here.

A preferment can be thought of in different ways. On one hand, it is a dough unto itself, and it has a BP formula all its own. But a preferment is also an ingredient in the final dough.

Look at this formula for baguette dough made with a poolish. The blue table shows the formula for the final dough, scaled to make 2340 g of dough. The yellow table shows the formula for the poolish, scaled to make 936 g, the amount needed for the final dough. Note that the formula for each part is based on the amount of flour needed for that part. Also note that the poolish is listed as an ingredient in the final dough formula.

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As promised, this installment of the Baker’s Percentage Tutorial focuses on how to make a given amount of dough from a BP formula. I’ll also discuss how to make dough that uses a given amount of a certain ingredient.

If you didn’t catch Part 1 and Part 2 of this tutorial, you may want to do so before reading any further. I’m assuming that you’re familiar with what BP is and how to convert a recipe into a BP formula.

A couple of things are helpful to have before getting started: a calculator and a “math is fun” attitude. Smile and repeat after me: “Math. Is. Fun.”

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A number of people left comments or sent email saying that they found Part 1 of my Baker’s Percentage Tutorial helpful. Thank you for that! And now that you know what baker’s percentage (BP) is, you might be wondering what you’re supposed to do with it.

In addition to flour, most bread contains three other basic ingredients: water, yeast, and salt. One thing BP is useful for is allowing you to look at the amounts of these ingredients and get a rough idea of the kind of bread the formula will make, and whether the ingredients are balanced.

Water

Bakers often talk about the “hydration” of a dough. Simply stated, hydration is the amount of water in a formula, relative to the amount of flour. That’s exactly the definition of the BP of water. Look at this dough formula:

• Flour 100%
• Water 66%
• Instant yeast 1%
• Salt 2%

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Answers to exercises for Part 2 of the Baker’s Percentage Tutorial.

Exercise 1

Consider this recipe:

• Flour 1000 g
• Water 680 g
• Yeast 30 g
• Salt 18 g

Express this recipe as a BP formula.
What is the hydration of this dough?
The type of yeast is not specified. What type do you think is intended?

Exercise 1 Answer

• Flour 100%
• Water 68%
• Yeast 3%
• Salt 1.8%

The hydration is 68%.
The yeast percentage is 3%. This probably means that fresh yeast is intended, because 3% would be quite high for active dry or instant yeast.

Exercise 2

Consider this formula:

• Flour 75%
• Whole wheat flour 20%
• Whole rye flour 5%
• Water 50%
• Milk 10%
• Instant yeast 1%
• Salt 2%

What is the hydration of this dough?
What type of dough do you think this is?

Exercise 2 Answer
The hydration is 60% (50% water + 10% milk).
60% hydration is quite low, especially given that this formula contains 25% whole grain flour (remember that whole grain flours absorb more water than white). This is probably a bagel or similar dough.

Exercise 3

What questions are raised for you by the following formula?

• Whole wheat flour 50%
• Rye flour 10%
• Semolina flour 10%
• Water 75%
• Fresh yeast 2.5%
• Salt 0.2%

Exercise 3 Answer
I know there is an error in the formula because the flour percentages do not add up to 100%. Also, I wonder if there may be an error in the salt, because 0.2% is quite low (although not unheard of).

If you bake bread, sooner or later you’re going to encounter (cue ominous music) Baker’s Percentage. Did I just strike fear in your heart? No doubt about it, this can be confusing, even scary, stuff. But it really doesn’t have to be.

My first brush with Baker’s Percentage (BP) came a few days after baking my first loaves, as I was perusing my newly-acquired copy of Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. I saw these weird sidebar versions of all the recipes in which the total of the ingredients always added up to more than 100%.

My first thought: Huh? Wow, this fellow really needs a math lesson.

This was followed pretty quickly by a second thought: Mr. Reinhart is a rock star baker and he’s managed to get quite a few books published; just maybe he knows a little more than you do about this, my dear. Maybe he’s on to something.

Lucky for me I had that second thought. It turns out that this convention, which to my knowledge is unique to bread bakers, is both straightforward and useful.

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