The Formula for Great Dough

I've had some training. It was an Advanced Bread Baking course, with a professional baker. We learnt how to make three different types of bread. I came home with arm-fulls of fresh loaves, rolls and batards. Sure, I learnt three new recipes, but I learnt so much more than that.

One of the most important things I learnt was a formula for great dough.

Up until now, most of my bread has been tasty, if not particularly beautiful. The texture has been fine but a bit hit-and-miss. The method that I have been using up until now, the one that I described on this site, does what you expect: it makes hassle-free, tasty bread.

Now, we can go one step better.

Since The Course (capital letters on the strength of it having been so important to my bread baking experience) my bread has been much more 'hit' than 'miss'. The texture has been fabulous and the appearance greatly improved. I attribute my increased success rate to one, simple thing: the percentage of water in the dough.

I've said all along that you can alter the amount of water and/or flour in the bread recipe without doing any damage to the finished product. You can add more water if the dough is too dry, or work in more flour if the dough is too wet. That's ok, the bread turns out fine.

But if you want your bread to turn out amazing... the quantities are a lot more important.

The magic number is 63.

That is to say, for your everyday white loaf, you need to have 63% water. Thus, in a recipe for one white loaf, use 500g of strong, plain flour and 315g water. 315 is 63 percent of 500. If you decide to make more dough than that, weigh the flour first and then calculate the water accordingly.

While you're at it, you can calculate the amount of yeast (1%) and salt (2%) in the same manner. So, for your 500g of flour, you need to use 5g of yeast and 10g salt.

If you're adding a flavour to the bread, such as fruit or cheese, 15% is a good level to aim for. For your 500g of flour, that's 75g of cheese, for example.

Now, I had always heard that beginners tend to make their dough too dry. I was heartened to notice, on The Course, that the dough we were making felt just about the same as the dough I made at home. The difference was that this dough - this perfect formula dough - was clean.

There was no need to knead on a floured surface. It didn't get stuck to the bowl. It wasn't clagging up my fingers and attaching itself up my arm.

In fact, using this formula, there tends to be a moment where the dough seems as if it's going to be too dry. It looks as if it's not going to come together, but then it does. In the past, I'd have sloshed in some more water but now I know better.

It turns out that perfect dough is slightly drier than I would have expected.

So, I've gone back through this site and updated all my recipes, altering the percentage of water in each case to match the so-called 'perfect dough formula'.

There are other alterations that I have made to my method in the light of The Course and we'll come to those in the next articles.

For now, I'll leave you with a summary of the formula for white bread.

Perfect Dough Formula

500g strong, white flour (100%)
5g dried yeast (1%)
10g salt (2%)
315g water (63%)

We'll look at the method in more detail next time.