A lot of people think that making sourdough is difficult. To be honest, the hardest part is making yourself refresh your starter before you go to bed after the odd glass of red wine. You think,”Nah, don’t really need to bake tomorrow. Can always leave it for another day …”
And then in the morning, if you did make the effort, you can’t remember what you were going to bake so you end up mixing you basic dough again.
Your basic dough makes the best bread in the world, so it’s not all bad. But a bit of variety would be nice now and again …
So, the 800g + 3%. My standard dough weight for a one-person pizza is 200g. The smaller the dough weight the more awkward it is to mix. You end up with more sticking to you hands than your finished dough-ball so you need to make more than one – and two’s not much better. So I’ve cut down from 8 and I’m now making 4 = 800g.
Traditionally, bakers don’t use recipes, they use formulas based on the percentage of ingredients in a dough. Won’t bother you with Bakers’ Percentage whereby the flour is always 100% and the other ingredients are percentages of the flour weight but you should know it exists. Shortly after I started baking for sale in 2007 I developed a spreadsheet calculator and entered my bread formulas because calculating amounts with a pencil and paper was keeping me awake at night.
So, I had my formulas in a spreadsheet and all I had to do was enter the number and size of loaves to be baked. It’s so obvious that using percentages and spreadsheets is the only was to proceed that I’m amazed that, twenty years on, bread books are still using weights to produce a standard sized loaf and probably fewer bakers understand percentages now than when I was starting.
This is going a long way round to explaining the 3%. Bread is sold by legal weights, a large loaf being 800g. But dough loses a lot of water in the bake so, for example, to achieve an 800g loaf I would start with 940g of dough. And, to be on the safe side, my spreadsheet would add an extra 3%. If you used exact amounts, you’d always be short because you lose dough on your hands, the work surface, the mixer, etc. Anything left over can be baked as mini baguettes for kids and dogs …
Anyway, I still use the extra 3%.
Mixed the dough on Monday. Baked an aubergine and red pepper pizza on Tuesday (200g).
Today, Thursday, I baked a deep pan sausage and garlic pizza (200g), I think I’ve now cracked the individual deep pan pizza using a six inch cake ring sitting on a pizza tin.
The final 400g went to make a Black Olive and Caramelized Onion Focaccia and is now in the freezer in quarters for snack time.
The 3% is somewhere between the three bakes …
