bread like watercolor

If you're here, I probably sent you, but if not, welcome! I'm Teddy, and among other things, I'm a baker. I built this site out of a desire to work on my own sourdough recipes, as well as to create a bunch of useful features that I wish every recipe website had.

This page describes how my recipes work. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to shoot me an email.

Formulae

This page is looks best on larger screens; some table columns are hidden on smaller screens.

The start of a bread recipe is a formula. Generallly in baking, formulae are represented as percentages (by weight). For example, I might create a 70% hydration dough with a basis of 500g:

That same recipe could be used to make more dough by simply changing the basis amount:

The basis can also be described as the total amount of flour in a formula.

Sub-formulae

A formula can contain other formulae as ingredients. I use the recursive nature of formulae a lot to calculate the amount of a preferment needed. In the following example, a Poolish (yeasted preferment) is part of the main dough's mix:

In the table above, 10% of the flour in the recipe is coming from the Poolish. Whenever you see a sub-formula as a percentage, just remember that it's the percentage of prefermented flour that sub-formula provides; this is really handy from a math perspective and doesn't matter all that much when actually mixing a recipe. Total amounts will be displayed in grams.

Here's a more in-depth example where a formula gets 8% prefermented flour from a Poolish, and 5% from a sourdough Leaven:

Ingredient substitution

One last thing with formulas on this site: sometimes I lie a bit. In cases where a dough doesn't expliticly contain a flour that a preferement does, such as a 100% whole wheat dough that uses my starter (which has 80% white flour), I'll opt to treat the white flour as one of the flours in the parent component to make sure the math is nice and clean.

When this is the case, you'll see a small note indicitating as much beneath the ingredient.

Process

A formula doesn't work without a process. I try to keep the process simple with my recipes, and I hope it's self-explanatory. I'm not inventing any new techniques (as far as I know) so you should be able to look these things up if it's unclear.

All preferments are slightly scaled-up in this view so there's some room for error. Target temperatures are listed sometimes as additional labels. If it's a baking step, the temperature is the oven temp. Here's an example process:

The ingredient boxes in steps also serve as a quick checklist. You can tap or click them to mark them as done. You can tap or click the step badge to toggle all ingredients related to that step. Additionally, you can wiggle the start time by a few hours--the time label for the first step is a dropdown for doing so.

Tweaks to recipe settings/state, such as start-time, checked ingredients, recipe versions/recipe scaling (not shown here) are saved to your browser storage. Everything can be reset manually on recipe pages at the top of the Process section.

And that's basically it. I'd love to hear feedback (be it on the recipes or the site itself), so don't hesitate to reach out. If you're looking for a place to start, check out the Fifty Fifty Loaf. Happy baking!