Whole Grain 100
Email: wholegrain100@proton.me
  • Welcome
  • Price Sheet
  • Store & Classes
  • Baking Education
  • Recipes
  • Grain Education
  • Health & Nutrition

Hydration

12/16/2022

0 Comments

 
Hydration, in bread baking terms, means how much water or liquid there is in a given amount of flour. Hydration is figured out by the weight of the water as a percentage of the weight of the flour. Both ingredients are weighed and then the total amount of water by weight is divided by the total amount of flour by weight.

Most loaf breads are around 65-75 percent while most pizza doughs are 80-100% percent. Math is not my best subject so I keep this formula handy so I can look at it and just plug in the numbers when adjusting the hydration of doughs. Knowing how to do this will help you when you have issues with your bread baking or changing your recipe to a sourdough recipe.

How to figure the hydration of your dough
Basic Pizza Recipe
260g water
303g hard white or hard red wheat flour
1/4 tsp (heaping) yeast 3g
1/4 tsp.  (heaping) salt  3g

260g water = .858 x 100 = 86%
303g flour


Now this recipe is simple, it doesn't have milk, honey, butter, and other items that may effect this number. Most of the time this ratio is good enough since the other ingredients are usually small amounts. If the recipe has large amounts of other ingredients you will need to look up on the internet what the hydration is and adjust accordingly. A good example is milk, it is about 87% water and the rest is milk solids. So is your recipe has 260g of milk instead of water the actual hydration of the milk is 226g  (260g x.87) = 226g You will be using the 226g when figuring the hydration of the dough.

Flour milled from North American hard wheat may have a protein content of 11-14%. It will absorb much more water than, say, a French flour with a protein content in the 8-10% range. You will even see variations from one bag of wheat to another when baking. You may have to adjust the hydration of your dough. 

If you are working with a flour that has a  weaker gluten like Spelt. You may  want to reduce the hydration in the dough to get the desired results depending on what you are making for example like pizza.



0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Yeast Bread
    Education


    Archives

    December 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    July 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    July 2019
    March 2019
    August 2018
    June 2018
    January 2017
    April 2016
    October 2015
    July 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015

    Categories

    All
    English Muffins
    Flat Breads
    Hamburger Buns
    Making Yeast Bread
    Pizza Crust
    Rolls
    Understanding Ingredients
    Yeast

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.