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0 pointssilisili2y ago0 comments

My wife makes sourdough, and this frustrated the hell out of me when she started. I asked her what hydration meant, and she said how much water was in it. So of course I told her to do water/water+flour.

Nope, apparently it's just water/flour...which doesn't make sense to me, as it allows 'hydration' to go over 100%.

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kevinmchugh2y ago

Why water/water+flour and not water/water+flour+salt+starter? Because water:flour is the key relationship - that's what dictates the outcome. I think some people who do a lot of enriched doughs will give everything as a percentage of the mass of flour, pretty convenient.

Really it's _just_ the ratio, normalized to 100 for convenience

silisiliOP2y ago

You're right, I meant water+flour+starter denominator. Didn't figure salt would matter enough.

My math brain wants everything as a percentage of a whole, but I see how it's simpler the way it is. Especially since the starter also has some relatively unknown amount of water and flour inside itself.

tasuki2y ago

The starter has a mostly similar percentage of water. And there isn't that much of it anyway to make a significant difference.

I'm not that experienced with baking, so take the above with a grain of salt!

1 more reply

mailund2y ago

While I agree it is unintuitive, it is super practical when calculating the recipe.

Making a 80% hydration pizza dough? Just measure how much flour you added and multiply by 0.8!

giraffe_lady2y ago

Kitchen scales start to have this feature built in at around the $60 point too. Dramatically simplifies bread baking, pickling, and a couple other pure ratio projects.

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