[mcaravey]

Commercial baker here. One place where this kind of math gets really weird is when the recipe uses multiple kinds of flours. We make a loaf that uses three kinds of flour, so this means a recipe will have flour percentages that are less than 100%, but that sum to 100% so the hydration percentage works.

For example, the recipe might say: Bread Flour 80%, Whole Wheat Flour 15%, and Rye Flour 5%. Personally I prefer just treating all ingredients as relative weights, and only convert to bakers math if needed. That is in large part because I wrote the software that is used on the production floor which spits out ingredient weights in grams, and no bakers math needed. It also keeps it simple for the employees, so they don’t have to learn how these ratios work.

I’ll also mention that the absolute best book on bread ever is the Modernist Bread set [0]. It’s pricey, but there are extremely well explained reasons behind certain methods, and debunking a lot of long held beliefs such as the efficacy of the autolyse.

[0] https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-bread/

[sophacles]

Neat! Im curious - were you in tech before becoming a baker at all, or did you pick up the programming skills to help your baking career?

I ask because I'm always interested in hearing how non-programmers end up programming. I've long held the opinion that we (tech that is) should try to make things more programmable by users (e.g. game scripting, excel, the "citizen developer" world of sharepoint), etc and like to hear how non-tech folks use programming to solve problems.

[mcaravey]

Oh, I do software by trade. The bakery is because it started as a family business that I helped get off the ground. My background is in B2B payments and construction software. Even though the bakery doesn’t make as much money as software, there’s a whole other world of experience to be gained by running a blue collar business that runs 20 hours a day, 7 days a week. Very very different that a software shop.

But to your point, most ERP planning software for bakeries sucks badly, like really badly. One of the prominent ones you can purchase today runs off a JET database from the 90s, with the “cloud” version just being Citrix access to a VM. but they all seem to universally require you to print out paper every day for every shift, so a ton of people just fall back on Excel (using bakers math) to pan production, daily. My software runs on an iPad that is kept at each station for kind of shift, and it spits out packing sheets and invoices from Quickbooks, and integrates with our delivery route planner. It would be a full time job to be calculating everything from mix quantities to how to pack the final product, without mistakes, 7 days a week.

There definitely needs to be better tools for the lay-person though. None of my staff can make changes to our custom software, but also it is basically impossible to recreate it with low/no-code tools. Hence Excel…

[esperent]

I'm in a basically identical situation to you, except it's my partner's cafe-bakery and I'm probably a few years behind you.

I've chosen to use Odoo rather than roll my own. It's highly customizable and open source. I'm self hosting it and I've written a couple of small plugins so far. I'm finding it pretty hackable. It's built from comfortably boring tech (Python + PostgreSQL backend, Bootstrap + JS frontend). Not perfect by any means (for example there's an annoying split between the paid and free versions, although there are plugins to extend the free version to do nearly everything the paid one can, at least for my needs), but from what I can see it's way ahead of most other similar offerings and there's a big community of developers behind it and tutorials for nearly everything.

It's a decent ERP for a restaurant. I will need to build some bakery specific stuff on top but it's already reducing our workload a lot. Previously my partner was doing the low tech excel sheets and paper receipts method and we're gonna do a slow transition to Odoo over the next 6 months or so.

Besides that, we are trialling Rocket.Chat for Slack style messaging and Outline wiki (Notion clone minus database views) for knowledge management, both free and self hosted.

Odoo is somewhat technical to learn, unavoidably (as with any ERP software). But it's been a good test of the other two to see whether non-technical baking staff can use them. Some of them are very non-technical, internet = Facebook level.

Besides a few teething problems, so far so good. It's a learning experience for me, for sure. I'm staying out of the kitchen mostly but I am studying the coffee side of the business which is lovely change of pace from coding.

[radanskoric]

I’m always super interested to hear about industries seemingly “neglected” by software. There are so many software product opportunities off the beaten path.

Would you mind sharing the name of that 90s software?

What makes it impossible to recreate with low/no-code tools? It sounds like a relatively standard interface over some calculations which sounds like it should fit.

[jillesvangurp]

Amateur baker here. Perhaps the best insight into baker's math is that it depends on a lot of factors: the humidity, the type of flour, how coarse/fine it is ground, protein content, etc. And then it also depends on your technique and skill creating strength and structure. Handling high hydration dough requires a lot of skill and not doing it properly means you end up with a flat bread rather than a loaf of bread. If it doesn't hold it's shape, either your technique is lacking or your hydration is too high (or both). Or you bought the wrong flour. Seriously, look for decent bread flour on Amazon or wherever. Chances are your local super market does not actually sell any flour a baker would be happy to use.

The main point of baker's math is not to have recipes that you can share on the internet which people can then blindly follow but to have a repeatable process that works for the flour you use and whatever level of technique/skill you have.

Say you bake bread with a certain type of flour at a 75% hydration and you had a hard time shaping the dough; next time using the same flour drop the percentage to 70% and you might have an easier time and if you are happy with the bread you stick with that hydration. Or work on your technique. Or both. If you switch flour brand or type, you'll have to figure out the optimum hydration level again. But being systematic about weighing out your ingredients means you can at least repeat it once you get to the optimal ratios.

[quag]

It’s a small world. One of my friends worked on those books. We enjoyed a few years eating test bread every time we saw them.

[mcaravey]

Nice, I’d love to have participated in their testing processes. They obviously treated it like a science and questioned a ton of institutional wisdom, and the results were fantastic.

[sneak]

This, at $500, stretches even my credulity, even as a collector of books, lover of bread, and owner of books about bread.

[mcaravey]

Yeah, it was an investment for sure. But it has allowed us to save a ton of time every day (e.g. save 30 minute on the autolyse), make tweaks to our recipes to match our processes, change our starters (use stiff levain instead of poolish for certain breads), and a bunch of other details. Not needed for the lay-person. For sourdough I’d opt for the Tartine books.

[eps]

Autolyse probably is not the best example. I have several bread-making books and I don't think a single one advocates for autolyse. Not Tartine, not Forkish's, not Reinhart's. Lots of youtubers and bloggers love it though, no idea why.

[mcaravey]

Maybe not, but they do look at that one because a bunch of books are totally in favor, and a bunch are either against it or ignore it, so coming up with a definitive answer was a reasonable thing to do. Other examples of time savers would be when to add fats and salts in a dough, and proofing and punching times.

I’d need to double check, but I could have sworn that Tartine did have an autolyse where they have you wait a half hour before adding the salt and last bit of water. I don’t have the book handy at the moment though…

[japhyr]

You are correct about the Tartine method. Skipping that step was one of the first customizations I made to their process, and I haven’t noticed any difference.

[eps]

My bad, Tartine does have a 20 min "rest" step before adding salt.

[adrian_b]

For normal bread a rest time may be not useful, but there are special purposes when it may be needed.

For example, I make for myself at home a bread that is highly enriched in proteins, by washing the dough before baking, to remove a large part of the starch, up to 75% of it, so that the dough is enriched in gluten (the wheat flour used has a gluten to starch ratio around 1:6, while the bread made thus has a gluten to starch ratio around 2:3).

If a rest time of at least 20 minutes is not inserted between kneading the dough and washing it, the dough is not cohesive enough and the washing detaches not only the starch grains but also gluten fragments, causing a loss of the proteins that are intended to remain in the bread.

It is possible that with a much longer time of kneading the rest time could be omitted, but when the kneading is done manually and you make just one bread for yourself, it is certainly preferable to knead for only a short time, followed by a rest time during which you are free to do other activities.

[jshmrsn]

Maybe you’ve already watched it, but Ragusea has a good 15m video on the topic, which goes over the chemistry and some pros and cons. Basically, it’s a trade off of less work (kneading) in exchange for more waiting. I imagine in an industrial context, it’s more efficient to just toss the dough into a machine.

https://youtu.be/orpTeX_EGXA

[menage]

The Tartine Bread book (as of 2018) explicitly recommends the autolyse/rest period (page 52, with more explanation on page 73).

[NaOH]

Read Calvel on autolyse. He's the person who developed the process. While I can't compare his work (The Taste of Bread) to Modernist Bread (not having read those books), he comes at it from a scientific angle, not just as a baker.

[chb]

Forkish explicitly calls for an autolyze period in most of the bread recipes he presents in “Flour Water Salt Yeast.”

[mmcgaha]

Funny how we will easily spend that on something ephemeral like a phone or vacation but question it for something that will last forever.

[perlgeek]

Is there a "Modernist Bread Essentials" that summarizes it and is a bit more affordable?

[eps]

> the Modernist Bread set. It’s pricey...

$625 is not "pricey", it's ridiculuously expensive.

[OJFord]

I'm not so sure, I had the same reaction to your comment, but then clicked through; it's a set of five thick books, essentially a history book, two textbooks, and two recipe books, at $125ea. Pricey, definitely, but phrased like that I think not so ridiculous.

[huhtenberg]

Even for 5 books it comes out to $125 per book and you must get all of them.

This doesn't really qualify as pricey.

[Retric]

It compares more favorably with collage textbooks which you could use these as.

Niche books can justifiably command higher prices.

[fknorangesite]

For five books? Have you shopped for textbooks recently (in the last 30 years)?

$625 is a goddamned bargain.

[zasdffaa]

Depends 100% on what you're going to get out of it/them.