In the summer of 2018, my wife and I decided to take a small course in bread making. We enjoyed the class and I found it interesting in the way that bread makers describe their recipes as formulas to simplify scaling.
While it is not difficult to create an Excel spread sheet to manipulate these formulas, I decided to create a simplified web page that anyone can use.
If you have access to the internet, you don't need to install anything to use this simple calculator. An on-line version that will run in your web browser can be found at:
Rename ingredients as necessary.
Set the percentage to 0.0 to temporarily delete an item.
Set the percentage values of your dough formula (recipe) in the right hand column. By convention, your flour weight will be 100.
If you have multiple types of flours in your recipe, then the sum of those flour percentages should come out to 100. For example, if you want the flour mix to be 90% white and 10% rye, set the white flour value to 90 and the rye value to 10.
Once you have your initial ingredients and percentage values set, you can start playing with the numbers to answer the following types of questions:
I want to adjust the salt level to 3% of the total flour content. Change the Percent value in the Salt row to 3.0 and the rest of the numbers will update.
I want to make 24 ounces of bread dough. Change the Total Mass units to oz and then set the value to 24.0.
I want to make 500 grams of bread dough. Change the Total Mass units to g and then set the value to 500.0.
I want to use 16 ounces of flour. Change the value of Wt (oz) column to 16.00 for the Flour row and all of the other ingredients and total mass will update accordingly.
I want to use a 7 g packet of instant yeast. Change the value of Mass (g) column to 7.0 for the Yeast row and all of the other ingredients and total mass will update accordingly.
I want to combine multiple flours so that I have 85% white, 5% rye and 10% wheat. Make sure you have 3 rows for flour in your table. Set the percent value of the white flour row to 85, the rye flour row to 5 and the wheat row to 10.
This field is used to set and view the total mass of the dough. This is the final value you should measure after combining all of the ingredients.
If you change this value, then the values in the Mass (g) and Wt (oz) columns will be adjusted accordingly.
This column is used to enter the formula (recipe) for your bread dough. Bread dough formulas are defined in arbitrary units that can be scaled to real world values.
By convention the total value for all of the flour should be 100. This allows bakers to think of all other ingredients as a percentage of flour weight. For example, if the flour value is set to 100 and the salt value is set to 2, then the amount of salt in the recipe will be 2% of the mass of the flour in the recipe (for every 100 grams of flour, there will be 2 grams or salt).
Here is an example formula:
| Ingredient | Mass (g) | Wt (oz) | Percent |
|---|---|---|---|
| White | 888.3 | 31.33 | 100.00 |
| Yeast | 5.8 | 0.20 | 0.65 |
| Salt | 17.8 | 0.63 | 2.00 |
| Water | 604.4 | 21.32 | 68.00 |
If your formula has multiple flour rows, then you will typically want to set those rows so that the sum of the flour rows is 100. For example if you want the flour to be composed of 90% white and 10% rye, you would enter:
| Ingredient | Mass (g) | Wt (oz) | Percent |
|---|---|---|---|
| White | 800.0 | 28.22 | 90.00 |
| Wheat | 88.9 | 3.14 | 10.00 |
| Yeast | 5.8 | 0.20 | 0.65 |
| Salt | 17.8 | 0.63 | 2.00 |
| Water | 604.4 | 21.32 | 68.00 |
Bakers prefer using mass or weight instead of volumes when mixing ingredients. This reduces issues related to density. The mass and weight columns display how much of each ingredient will be required in both grams and ounces.
If you change the mass or weight of an ingredient, the Total Mass will be recalculated and the mass and weight of all ingredients will be adjusted to maintain the same percentages.
This is not a common use case, but if you only had 500 g of flour left to work with, it will figure out the values for the rest of your ingredients for you.
There are some "preset" links available below the table on the right side labeled as numeric digits ("0", "1", ...). Clicking on a preset link will load in one of the default recipes. Hover over the a preset link for a tool tip describing the recipe.
There are some action links available below the table on the right side.
This action will open a link with the current recipe encoded in the URL. This allows a specific recipe to be book marked, copy/pasted or embedded into an HTML document.
Clicking on this action adds a new row to the end of the table.
Easter Egg Changing the label of a row to "+" can be used to insert a row in the table. The row will be inserted above and the original label will be restored.
Clicking on this action removes the last row from the table. There is no confirmation - you click it, it's gone!
Easter Egg Changing the label of a row to "-" can be used to delete a specific row.
This is a rather simple tool with the following design goals:
It performs a single simple task.
It should run in any modern HTML 5 browser.
It requires no server side processing (you can copy the source files to your disk and use it off line if necessary).
Feel free to modify, extend or completely re-factor.