[silisili]

My wife makes sourdough, and this frustrated the hell out of me when she started. I asked her what hydration meant, and she said how much water was in it. So of course I told her to do water/water+flour.

Nope, apparently it's just water/flour...which doesn't make sense to me, as it allows 'hydration' to go over 100%.

[kevinmchugh]

Why water/water+flour and not water/water+flour+salt+starter? Because water:flour is the key relationship - that's what dictates the outcome. I think some people who do a lot of enriched doughs will give everything as a percentage of the mass of flour, pretty convenient.

Really it's _just_ the ratio, normalized to 100 for convenience

[silisili]

You're right, I meant water+flour+starter denominator. Didn't figure salt would matter enough.

My math brain wants everything as a percentage of a whole, but I see how it's simpler the way it is. Especially since the starter also has some relatively unknown amount of water and flour inside itself.

[tasuki]

The starter has a mostly similar percentage of water. And there isn't that much of it anyway to make a significant difference.

I'm not that experienced with baking, so take the above with a grain of salt!

[giraffe_lady]

Once you're going for consistent loaves eg selling them to people who expect them to be the same every day, you do have to factor in hydration of the starter. Usually you keep it the same as the dough for simplicity but there are reasons why it might make sense for them to be different.

[mailund]

While I agree it is unintuitive, it is super practical when calculating the recipe.

Making a 80% hydration pizza dough? Just measure how much flour you added and multiply by 0.8!

[giraffe_lady]

Kitchen scales start to have this feature built in at around the $60 point too. Dramatically simplifies bread baking, pickling, and a couple other pure ratio projects.