Advanced Bread Making Course 🍞
Part 2: Creating A Recipe

Of course, whilst understanding your ingredients will help you make great bread, the key factor in developing your own recipes is consistency.

You need to be able to accurately measure your raw materials and create a formula balance (so that the ingredients used in a recipe remain in the same ratio, irrespective of the size of the batch you are making). Being able to do this is what allows you to be confident your bread will turn out every time and also allows you to be able to communicate your results and pass them on to other people.

THE BAKER SAYS: "Bread making is a science that relies on various ingredients being present in specific quantities so that certain chemical reactions can occur at measurable speeds. Variations of ingredients and quantities can have a dramatic effect on your bread dough and final bread products and while amazing new ideas and methods can result from happy accidents, if the quantities are unknown, the happy accident cannot be converted to a new recipe anyway, so – ALWAYS MEASURE YOUR INGREDIENTS".

Bakers Percentage %

Because measurement and proportion are so important in the baking process, Baker's write their recipes as formulas and they use a technique known as the Bakers Percentage. That is: they write their bread recipes out in mathematical form and they express the flour quantity as 100%. All other ingredients are then described as percentages of this flour weight.

To make a batch of bread using the formula, the first thing you need to do is to convert the formula from Bakers Percentage to a Per Kilo Flour Weight formula – remember, bakers base all their ingredients on flour weight. To do this we simply multiply the flour weight by the ingredient percentages.

A typical bread recipe then, written as a Baker's Percentage would look like this:

Please Note: one of the side effects of using the flour weight as the basis for the formulas is that liquid ingredients then need to be measured by WEIGHT not VOLUME as would normally be the case in other recipes.

Calculate Bakers Percentage Tool

Input flour weight if you want to do your own calculations.

Please Note: most mistakes made using the Baker's Percentage happen because figures have not been written down correctly or either the zero or the decimal point has been left out or put in the wrong spot.

You will also notice from the tables above that by adding up the kilo weights, you can get a total weight for your actual batch – this can be very useful for working out how many individual loaves or buns, etc. a particular sized batch will make.

When discussing recipes though, be careful not to get confused between the flour weight and the actual dough weight.

This basic bread formula can be adapted in many ways to make many different styles of bread and though there are accepted ratios of one ingredient to another, individual recipes can vary to quite a staggering degree. For instance: Brioche is a very rich, sweet, traditional French bread (often used to make French toast in fact!). To make it, essentially you adapt the formula above by changing the oil to butter. The percentage of butter to flour in brioche recipes can be as high as 60% - and likewise, the egg percentage could rise as high as 60% and there may be up to 20% sugar – a pretty decadent bread indeed!, but still easy to express using the formula method.

Flour Combinations

In bread making, a combination of two or more types of flour is often desirable for flavour, texture or appearance. This is easily expressed using the Baker's Percentage method. You just need to ensure that the total flour weight is still 100%.

Flour Types

Normal Flour

Wholemeal Plain Flour

Buckwheat Flour

Besan Chickpea Flour

Maize Flour

Light Rye Flour

As well as these fairly readily available flour types, using a home mill or buying from a speciality mill or health food shop with a mill, it is also possible to grind or get quite a few different grains ground to your specifications and in the quantities and ratios you desire.

Grain Types

Wheat Grains

Spelt Grains

Rye Grains

Millet Grains

Red Quinoa Grains

Buckwheat Grains

Barley Grains

Amaranth Grains

These speciality flours and mixes are particularly useful in advanced and speciality bread making, where a combination of two or more types of flour is often desirable for flavour, texture or appearance. These combinations are easily expressed using the Baker's Percentage method. You just need to ensure that the total flour weight is still 100%.

Whole Grains

Whilst we have touched on the different types of grains used to make flour above, it is also quite common to include whole, kibbled or flaked grains in bread as well.

These grains can either be calculated in the flour weight itself or alternatively, they can be included after it (with the salt, oil, etc).

As an aside, whilst you always use the dry weight of grains for recipes and formulas, it is usual to soak most whole and kibbled grains in water for either a few hours or overnight before adding them to the dough. The water percentage of the formula may need to be reduced slightly to compensate for this soaking. As a general rule, grains absorb just under their own weight in water, but you may need to adjust this according to the grain and the amount of time you leave it to soak. Rolled oats, for instance, absorb water both like a sponge and extremely quickly, but any kibbled grain will both absorb much less water and take far longer to do so...

Formulas with a combination of two or more flours and/or whole or kibbled grains expressed in both Baker's Percentage and as a Per Kilo Flour Weight Dough would then look like this:

Using the formula, you can now not only work out your ingredient weights/quantities, you can calculate your:

Expected Yield

This is the total size of your dough batch and is calculated by adding up the individual ingredient weights. For instance, in the example above, the expected yield of a 1 kg flour weight dough batch is 1.685 kg dough, the expected yield from a 3 kg flour weight dough is 5.055 kg. From this figure you can decide how to divide up your batch (e.g., will I make 5 x 1 kg loaves or 3 x 1 kg loaves and 20 x 100 g buns with my batch?)

For the record, a standard loaf is usually made from 780 g of dough. Big bread rolls require around 80 g, and dinner rolls and small rolls are usually made with about 65 g.

Due to the evaporation of most of the water in the dough, the weight of the finished bread is always lighter. Your standard 780 g dough weight bread for instance will yield up a 680 g finished loaf.

Required Yield

The other way to use the figures is of course to work backwards. You can start with what you want to end up with and work back to see how much of your ingredients you will need to make a batch of a certain size.

For instance, if I want to end up with enough dough in my batch to make 10 x 1 kg loaves, using the formula above (where my expected yield percentage is 168.5%), that means a dough batch of 10 kilos represents 168.5 % of my flour weight. This means that my flour weight should be (10 divided by 168.50 x 100 =) 5.934 kilos, my salt weight should be (5.934 divided by 100 x 2 =) 0.11868 grams (rounded up to .119 here and to 12 or possibly even 15 in your recipe!), etc.

See if you can calculate out the rest of the formula for the 10 x 1kg required yield batch.

Answer for the 10 x 1kg required yield batch.