Bread can change the world

[aaronatthedoublef]

I realized as I was making pizza dough I always have left overs. I'll keep the leftovers from batch to batch until I have enough to make a pizza. But how much old dough would I need for a new batch of dough?

I make five pounds of dough from two pounds of water. I have 1.5 pounds of either cake flour or Caputo tipo oo when I can find it, 1 pound of KAF white whole wheat, and 4 ounces each of BRM flax meal and chickpea flour.

Also, how would I turn this into baker's math amounts?

Thanks

[Mike Nolan]

The amount of 'old dough' added to a new batch varies a lot.

I've seen a number of articles that say the old dough makes up anywhere from 10% to 1/3 of the new batch.

But I've also seen videos where the amount of 'old dough' being added to a large commercial mixer was more like a few cups of dough, which I think would be way below 10% of the resulting batch.

My guess is the less old dough you inoculate with, the longer you have to give it to percolate. That's the classic baker's tradeoff, trading time for flavor.

As to converting to baker's percentages, remember the total new flour weight becomes 100%. The old dough is treated like adding yeast, even though there is technically flour and water in the 'old dough', but it isn't part of the 100%, just like salt or yeast wouldn't be in a straight dough formula. Flax meal and chickpea flour would (IMHO) be part of the flour weight.

It's taken a while for me to get my head around old dough formulas, but basically the old dough will have the same hydration percentage as the current batch, so both the water and the flour in the old dough can be ignored when computing hydration, as you're adding in something that's at the same hydration level as your dough.

So, your formula would look something like this:

Cake Flour or TP00 1.5 pounds
WWW Flour 1 pound
flax meal .25 pound
chickpea flour .25 pound

That gives you 3 pounds of flour, so that's your 100%.

To that you add 2 pounds of water, giving you a hydration level of 67%.

You also (presumably) have salt and old dough to add in, both as a percentage of the flour weight. How much old dough you use is probably something you'll need to experiment with. Oh dear, more excuses to make pizza! But you need to work backwards, if you want to add 1 pound of old dough to your next batch and have 5 pounds of dough to bake with, you need to make 6 pounds of dough, which would be 5 pounds of new ingredients and 1 pound of old dough. Does that help?

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. This helps a lot. I will definitely need to experiment! Been meaning to do that anyway.

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