Formulations are fun!

All over the online bakery world, people refer to ‘bread recipes’. Can you give me the recipe to this or that bread?

I have to tell you, there’s really no ‘bread recipe’. There are only ‘bread formulations’. A recipe is essentially a measured bunch of ingredients, and a run sheet as to how each thing is cooked or processed. Bread is simpler than this, and more complex as well. Sourdough bread is a process of fermentation, so formulas are necessary to control and assess what is essentially a biological and chemical process.

If you want to get really technical, a formulation can also include specific temperatures and times - though this can be quite hard to accurately do because everybody’s baking environment, as well as their ability to manipulate temperatures, is different.

Flour, water and salt - and ‘yeast’?

When making sourdough, the fermentation’s biology is affected by the ingredients, and how they interact with each other chemically at certain hydrations and concentrations.

Proper sourdough has only three ingredients in the dough; flour, water and salt.

You could argue there is yeast in sourdough bread, making it a fourth ingredient. You would be incorrect, I believe, as true ‘sourdough yeast’ is made of just flour and water. Calling true sourdough culture ‘yeast’ is actually repeating the ingredients in the list twice, because, as I just mentioned, sourdough yeast is flour and water.

Baker’s yeast, on the other hand, is allowed in sourdough; it is often used, and is just yeast. It’s not made of flour and water. Thus, it is listed as a separate ingredient. In my world, at least, this type of yeast is quite rightly listed as an ingredient, if used.

True Sourdough culture is much more than yeast. It’s bacteria, enzymes and any number of strains of wild yeast in a naturally symbiotic relationship. It’s a fermentation, or a culture fed with flour and water.

Indeed, it’s probably easier to consider ‘culture’ as a term for a variety of ingredients which together do the job of fermenting something. Culture, then, can become an ingredient. ‘Sourdough Starter’ or ‘Sourdough Culture’ is not ‘yeast’. It can be listed in a formulation, though, just like yeast. But it isn’t really an ingredient.

Thus, ‘flour, water, salt’ remain the three ingredients in true sourdough bread.

Formulation magic

A formulation is ultimately based on percentages. This is where it differs from a recipe. A baker’s formulation is scaleable. Measurements of ingredients are derived from these percentages, according to how much dough you wish to make.

Quantum vs Baker’s percentages

In a raw sense, you could reduce a sourdough formulation to a bunch of percentages, made up of flour, water, salt and sourdough culture (starter).

That might look like this:

60% flour

38% water

1% starter

1% salt

This way of viewing a formulation is just one way of looking at percentages. It happens to be simple and easy to think through in your head, without really using a calculator. I call this ‘Total’ or ‘Quantum’ percentaging. There are ways to break theses ‘quantum’ formulations down into even simpler (and more meaningful) bits, which I’ll get to shortly. But as it is, we can work backwards from this bunch of percentages to get weights for each of the ingredients.

Those of you experienced bakers will immediately raise an eyebrow to the 1% starter I’ve used in this recipe. It’s too small, I hear you say! Here’s a secret - it’s the basic formulation I use for all my commercial dough making. This particular formulation involves prefermentation, and this hugely affects how much culture is used. I’ll return to this shortly.

Another, more common way to do formulations is to consider that the flour component is 100%, and that everything is measured as a percentage against that.

This method is usually referred to as ‘baker’s percentages’. The same formulation as was used in the previous paragraph would then mean that:

100% flour

63% water

1.6% starter

1.6% salt

Many bakers find this system works for them - and indeed, this latter way of looking at it also tells us that the ‘hydration’ of the dough is 63%. This way of doing formulations is very useful in a bakery context, as it provides a kind of metric which can be varied. The constant, then, is flour. However, it’s a bit hit and miss when you need to work backwards from a desired dough weight. You need to do another level of calculation to figure out things.

Both ways of doing formulations work well. They are intended to be a kind of mental simplification tool, and bakers the world over use them daily. I have noticed that in Australia and the US, the latter type of ‘baker’s percentage’ is the usual language, while in Europe the ‘quantum percentages’ (the first example) are used in many bakeries.

I use the quantum method in my bakery. This is because I ‘build’ dough from a common formulation. Once I have a ‘base dough’ built, I can add other things to it, like fruit or grain. The base dough can only be made from flour, water and salt (and ‘starter’, which is flour and water). When I add fruit or grain or anything else, I can do so as a percentage of the total dough weight, rather than having to go back and calculate the individual baker’s percentages for each particular dough. It means that I can work out formulations on the fly - I don’t need to run a bunch of numbers through a calculator to work out how much to add.

For example, my formulation might involve adding 10% porridge (a porridge is a soaked or cooked grain mix) to my base dough. Say I have 10kg of dough weighed out, then I just add a kilogram of porridge to it. I can fold it through the base dough either by hand or in the mixer. It’s easy to work out how to build the dough without resorting to complex calculations this way.

I tend to adjust my formulations to suit simple percentages, like 10, 20, 25, 33 or 50 percent. These can be incorporated into formulations by someone with a very small brain such as myself.

Breaking it down

If you were to look at the above formulation as a series of ‘stages’ of making dough, each with their own formulation, it might look like this;

Quantum Formulation (by total dough weight):

Preferment (sponge)

25% Flour

25% Water

1% Starter

Dough

35% Flour

13% Water

1% Salt

Baker’s Formulation (by flour weight)

Preferment

40% Flour

40% Water

2% Starter

Dough

60% Flour

23% Water

2% Salt

As you can see, both versions are the same formulation, with two different ways of looking at it. The quantum method allows you start with a dough weight and then work backwards to the individual ingredients, stage by stage. The baker’s method assumes a total flour weight first, then the dough is built mathematically by adding water to the flour totals. If you want to know the total dough weight using the baker’s percentage method, you have to do some slightly more sophisticated mathematics to get there.

To go a bit further down the rabbit hole of formulations, the quantum method could be broken down in another way:

1% Starter

50% Preferment

35% Flour

13% Water

1% Salt

This is a pretty easy way to get a grip of a formulation which has two stages. Using the other method of baker’s percentages to get a similar ‘bird’s eye’ view isn’t so easy.

Flour, water, salt, and ‘other stuff’

I’m constantly asked about how to add things to plain dough - like grains, porridges, pastes or fruits. I’m not going to cover preparations here, as that’s a separate subject - but I always answer this question by saying that you build your plain dough first, then add things. Don’t just add all the ingredients and hope you will get some sort of consistent result. Everything you add to a dough will have some sort of chemical effect on the dough, so you have to make sure that you have a consistent place to work from. That’s why in all my workshops I teach people to add things at the end.

To this end, the formulation should be simple to work out. Using the quantum method to do this is by far the easiest way to go. Here’s an example using a ‘porridge’. This is simply a cooked grain which is added to the dough after it has cooled:

Porridge bread (quantum formulation):

100% Plain dough

10% Porridge mix

So if you were starting with a 1kg plain dough, you would simply add 100g of porridge. The total dough, including the porridge will weigh 1.1kg now. It’s easy to figure out various permutations using this method. It’s also still quite easy to work backwards from the total dough weight as well.

Bakers in the real world use combinations of both bakers and quantum percentages to arrive at their finished loaf formulation. In the example above, very few bakers would take the time to calculate the porridge against the flour weight - they would just add it in quantum as I’ve done here.

I’ve created a whole production system based around these quantum formulations in my bakery. This means that I can pretty much do the calculations for the entire bake in my head. Other bakers prefer to use baker’s percentages, but I have an aversion to putting dough all over calculator keyboards, so I’ll stick to the quantum method. Why not come to a day or more of a 300 series workshop to learn how in more detail? If you are baking more than one or two loaves at a time, or are setting up a Community Supported Bakery, this will make your life so much easier!