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Baker's Math (2009)
- NextHendrix 4y agoDon't forget to multiply the result by 13/12
- _Microft 4y agoIs this a joke or an advice which could use some more explanation?
- vecter 4y agoIt’s a joke. A “baker’s dozen” is 13, not the standard 12.
- cochne 4y agoIt’s a reference to a bakers dozen - make 13 so you can taste one and be left with 12.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mlnhd 4y agoA “baker’s dozen” is 13. Presumably so that the baker gets one to himself.
- AlecSchueler 4y agoIt's because in older days without modern packaging you could expect one egg to break on the way home.
- temporalparts 4y agoThis was a response to an old law where bakers were accused of "cheating" customers by overpricing undersized loaves or intentionally creating giant air pockets in their bread to minimize the amount of converted flour the customer would be getting. one such source: https://www.britannica.com/story/why-is-a-bakers-dozen-13 https://www.britannica.com/story/why-is-a-bakers-dozen-13
- travisjungroth 4y agoThat article doesn’t have any sources and I’m hesitant to take it as a primary source. A blog isn’t an encyclopedia, even with the same name. Also doesn’t pass some cursory thinking. If the law is about loaves being too light or small, how does giving out an extra loaf to people who buy 12 help? Who is even buying 12 loaves of bread when restaurants are rare and refrigeration non-existent? Armies, but then they’re buying even way more. I don’t know why this needs a backstory. A dozen is a common number for objects because it’s highly composite. Then buy X get 1 free promotions are one of the simplest ways to give discounts. No one has to be the first to do it. It could spread and people could come up with it on their own.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> If the law is about loaves being too light or small, how does giving out an extra loaf to people who buy 12 help? If the baker gives you 13 and calls it 12, that makes it harder for a greedy baker narrative to stick. It doesn't have to be logical, it's about managing impressions. > Who is even buying 12 loaves of bread when restaurants are rare and refrigeration non-existent? The average family used to be the size of a small army. 12 loafs of bread could be eaten in 1 or 2 days if you've got 12 hungry kids and bread is a major component of their diet.
- travisjungroth 4y agoIt doesn’t add up that it would just be about managing impressions or controlling a narrative. The fact that there was a law regulating the price of loaves of bread is well recorded. Anyone selling loaves too small but also selling baker’s dozen would be in violation. I regret trying to say buying a dozen would be uncommon. It’s more that even if they sell a dozen, of course there’d frequently be orders smaller than that.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoBakers were under constant suspicion of cheating customers and the regulations. Adulterated flour was a big concern too, not just loafs too small or airy. To manage their reputations, I think bakers would rationally take any edge they can get.
- based2 4y agohttps://www.expressio.fr/expressions/treize-a-la-douzaine https://www.expressio.fr/expressions/treize-a-la-douzaine
- chrisshroba 4y agoBold move explaining the joke in French
- selimthegrim 4y agoThis sounds like Shi’ite inheritance math.
- devonallie 4y agoWhen adding butter, throw away the formula.
- ajfinnie 4y agoWhen it comes to Pao Doce (a Portuguese sweet bread), butter is an absolutely necessary ingredient. And unquestionably delicious!
- yebyen 4y agoI think people who are downvoting must have misunderstood the joke. The joke is, add more butter. It's like estimating for an engineer, or adding the appropriate amount of salt and spice for a midwestern home cook. You can never ever go high enough. Whatever you were about to do with the butter, just multiply it by 3x and add 50% more on top again after. (The one weird hack you wish you didn't know about your favorite restaurants' most flavorful dishes!)
- colechristensen 4y agoMichelin star level mashed potatoes are like a third butter, not even exaggerating.
- annoyingnoob 4y agoFor 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%.
- nsb1 4y agoExactly this. It's this sort of thing that annoys me about recipes in general, but bread recipes in particular.
- ycombinete 4y agoYou get used to it. In practice it makes things very simple! Especially if you have a scale with a % option [0], but even without if you’re cooking with nice round metric weights. I just chuck some flour on the scale, whack the % symbol, and use the set percentages for everything else. [1] https://myweigh.com/product/kd8000/ https://myweigh.com/product/kd8000/
- sva_ 4y agoI just use 80% hydration, it makes things easier and tastier.
- JustSomeNobody 4y agoA bit messy though.
- ycombinete 4y agoFor me, anything over 65% usually requires stretch and fold technique, as opposed to a knead. It's not messy at all when done that way.
- AlecSchueler 4y agoDepends a lot of ambient humidity. When I lived in the North of Ireland (rainforest humidity) I always had to vastly reduce the humidity level of every recipe, sometimes by as much as half, otherwise I'd be drinking my baguettes.
- stormdennis 4y agoShould it not be Bakers' Math?
- tromp 4y agoIt certainly should be, as this guy explains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFGv6wd5Y8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFGv6wd5Y8
- pessimizer 4y agoThat would be an insult to Mr. Baker.
- informal007 4y agoLittle question, Why isn’t the total 100 percent?
- fknorangesite 4y agoThis 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.
- SnowHill9902 4y agoIt’s called abuse of notation as it’s useful in practice but not strictly a percentage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_of_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_of_notation
- jameshart 4y agoWhat’s the abuse here? This seems like ‘math’ to me.
- travisjungroth 4y agoAbuse of notation is incredibly common in mathematics, there’s no conflict there. The abuse would be if you think that percentages should always refer to portions of the whole. Not sure that’s correct, though.
- sentrysapper 4y agoAs in it goes against the designed usage (where total is 100%), but it still works. The total ingredients being 170% can be found confusing initially. I'm glad the author provided more context and the example of a 500g flour recipe.
- jameshart 4y agoWhy does the total have to be 100%? Do all fractions have to add to 1?
- crdrost 4y agoI don't know that I'd use the term abuse, but the basic idea is that there are things called odds ratios (Bayes' theorem looks especially convenient with them!) as distinct from things called probabilities... The distinction is precisely this one, that probabilities are implicitly normalized to 100% total while odds you're supposed to sum everything together and divide. And then the point is just that we typically condition people to treat percentages as probabilities rather than odds. So you would have said something like 50:33:1:0.3 in “odds speak” for flour:water:salt:yeast in the dough mixture discussed in OP. But bakers instead communicate “:66:2:0.6” with the first number always implicitly being 100 (great), and they then use the % symbol (slightly confusing). Because they never say “flour: 100%” an unsuspecting novice might think that a 60% hydration dough is ~40% flour by mass, mix this together to form a 150%-hydration mixture, and wonder why the only thing that they can make with it is some sort of pancakes.
- karesztrk 4y agoFyi https://breadtoolkit.netlify.app/calculator https://breadtoolkit.netlify.app/calculator
- andreasscherman 4y agoSlightly 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 https://breadfriend.com.
- dxdm 4y agoIn the first sentence on the start page, there's an unnecessary apostrophe in the word "recipes". It's a plural form, not a possessive. Not everyone will agree or care, but this kind of thing can have an unfortunate effect when people come to the page for the first time and form an opinion about it.
- andreasscherman 4y agoThanks, appreciate it. Fixed!
- mcaravey 4y agoCommercial 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/ https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-bread/
- sophacles 4y agoNeat! Im curious - were you in tech before becoming a baker at all, or did you pick up the programming skills to help your baking career? I ask because I'm always interested in hearing how non-programmers end up programming. I've long held the opinion that we (tech that is) should try to make things more programmable by users (e.g. game scripting, excel, the "citizen developer" world of sharepoint), etc and like to hear how non-tech folks use programming to solve problems.
- mcaravey 4y agoOh, I do software by trade. The bakery is because it started as a family business that I helped get off the ground. My background is in B2B payments and construction software. Even though the bakery doesn’t make as much money as software, there’s a whole other world of experience to be gained by running a blue collar business that runs 20 hours a day, 7 days a week. Very very different that a software shop. But to your point, most ERP planning software for bakeries sucks badly, like really badly. One of the prominent ones you can purchase today runs off a JET database from the 90s, with the “cloud” version just being Citrix access to a VM. but they all seem to universally require you to print out paper every day for every shift, so a ton of people just fall back on Excel (using bakers math) to pan production, daily. My software runs on an iPad that is kept at each station for kind of shift, and it spits out packing sheets and invoices from Quickbooks, and integrates with our delivery route planner. It would be a full time job to be calculating everything from mix quantities to how to pack the final product, without mistakes, 7 days a week. There definitely needs to be better tools for the lay-person though. None of my staff can make changes to our custom software, but also it is basically impossible to recreate it with low/no-code tools. Hence Excel…
- Pinus 4y agoI tend to think of this as cocktail math. :)
- eyelidlessness 4y agoI’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.
- emadabdulrahim 4y agoSame. I was pleasantly surprised by the simplicity of the math and the usefulness of it.
- chrisbuc 4y agoI've always thought of baking as a science and cooking as an art (although both are on a spectrum from art to science).
- eyelidlessness 4y agoThat’s basically how I thought of it too, but now I think I can kind of understand the science.
- nayuki 4y ago> learning that baking recipes are ratios of mass makes me feel more comfortable [...] It’s such a simple concept Yes. Almost all recipes get the presentation wrong by using a mix of units and fractions, e.g.: 1 cup flour, sifted 2/3 cup water 1 tsp salt 0.5 g yeast 1 large egg
- Woodi 4y agoWe 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.
- xani_ 4y ago> 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 ?? Teaching it in such uninteresting ways kids don't remember it. And I'm not surprised based on funding and wages...
- just_boost_it 4y agoThis is how concrete mixes are specified as well, all relative to the mass of cement.
- ReptileMan 4y agoThat 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.
- bee_rider 4y agoFrom an outsider point of view, my gut agrees. I mean, wouldn't it be easier to start with the quantity of end product, and go from there (It is just arithmetic to convert anyway, but still, the amount of dough in the end is what you care about, right?). But I'm sure there's a reason they do it this way instead, Surely we aren't the first ones to think of this obvious alternative. I believe historically flour was big economic concern for bakers, so maybe putting it in terms of the thing that makes the biggest dent in their budget was more convenient.
- sircastor 4y agoMy 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.
- ace2358 4y agoI’ve never understood cooking by volume and will reject any recipe that uses it. Especially for ingredients that don’t have a fixed density. 1 cup of flour? I can easily get double the amount in my cup depending on how I scoop it. 1 cup chopped mint leaves… wtf? 1 large potato… kill me! At the farmers market potato’s can come in very different shapes and sizes. I’m confident enough of a cook to know how much mint and potato I want, but it’s impossible for flour. My rule of thumb is if the packet describes it in grams, then why should the recipe use volume?? Converting between volume and weight is also senseless for anything other than water.
- jrockway 4y agoI guess what you can take away from volume recipes is that the quantities aren't that critical. Usually your recipe will turn out quite delicious even if you get a small "large potato" or an oversized "large egg". You're right though that you can definitely pack a measuring cup with flour and get more than you intended. Bread can be pretty persnickety too, which is why volume based recipes mention how to fill the measuring cup.
- JustSomeNobody 4y agoWhile it’s impossible to know how much the cup of flour weighed at the time the recipe was written, you can start by looking up how much the flour you are using weighs per cup and try that much with the recipe. Then if you feel it needed more flour, make a notation.
- mcphage 4y ago> 1 large potato… kill me! At the farmers market potato’s can come in very different shapes and sizes. Yeah—and what happens if you end up with a large potato the size of a small potato? Then you're completely hosed.
- eugenekolo 4y agoWhen 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.
- rmetzler 4y agoJust 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.
- sircastor 4y agoOnce when I was a kid I was attempting to make Croissants and I misread a recipe and added 3 Tablespoons of salt instead of 3 teaspoons (and for anyone who doesn’t know the math offhand, I put in 9 teaspoons of salt). Suffice to say, they did not turn out.
- twawaaay 4y agoFor 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.
- layer8 4y agoSimilar for cocktails.
- thiagocsf 4y agoWhen 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.
- lupire 4y agoMore "baker's units" than "baker's math". It's regular math.