What are you Baking the Week of January 22, 2023?

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike.

I really like baker's math. It makes scaling easier, especially if I can automate it in a spreadsheet. I can just put in a number for the flour and everything adjusts itself and I can see how much dough I'll have at the end. I adjusted my formula for challah until it would yield four loaves and I had a little over four loaves!

Also, measuring by weight reduces the amount of things to wash after making something.

[skeptic7]

I did scones and pan pizza again. No experimenting just the same recipe as last time. Its comfort baking in a small kitchen. I was pleasantly surprised by how light and fluffy the pan pizza came out. So I've used up all the mozarella and provolone cheese and still have have a jar of pizza sauce left. Does this have any non pizza uses?

[Mike Nolan]

I've set up several spreadsheets with a 'yield' column, you change it and everything else changes to produce the desired weight. I have charts for puff pastry and croissant pastry that cover batches from 200 grams to 1000 grams.

[RiversideLen]

Skeptic, you can portion and freeze the leftover sauce for future pizzas. Or you can thin it a little and use it as a pasta sauce.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. I figured this had to exist. I was building it myself to push my Excel skills.

Skeptic, we use pasta sauce for pizza, omelettes, and even pasta.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's my laminated dough spreadsheet, you can see how I use the yield row at the top of each set to adjust the ingredients based on the percentage column.

I've been using spreadsheets since before Visicalc, in fact I taught a course at the University of Nebraska Business College on using spreadsheets for financial modeling in around 1980.

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[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. I appreciate it.

[rottiedogs]

This is so very cool. I have something similar that I use at work that calculates gross margin that I thought I could adapt at some point time permitting. I never did get around to it but now I don't have to.

Thank you for sharing!

[Mike Nolan]

Thanks, Rottiedogs, nice to see you posting again.

Everyone here should feel free to adapt this spreadsheet and let us know what you use it for. And let me know, either online or off-line, if you need help tweaking the spreadsheet. Excel has a lot of powerful features, I'm sure there are many features I've never used at all or to their full extent.

Several BBGA members have Excel spreadsheets that handle multi-stage formulas (ones with a starter or soaker) and that more closely resemble the BBGA formula standard.

I keep thinking there should be a way to do the BBGA formula standard as a webpage, but I don't think there's an easy way to do it in WordPress. I've looked at using Drupal, their built-in form tool isn't quite robust enough to do it, either.

In computer technical terms, it is a bill of materials system, and a multi-stage one if it handles starters and soakers. A really complex one, that handles multiple independent products, can be used to drive the daily production planning of a bakery.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. I'm trying to figure out how to add starter to my formula. I'm still not sure about how much of a percentage of the whole it should be.

Google and Microsoft (and others too, probably) both host online forms that can link in their spreadsheets. I don't know how easy it would be to pull that into the BBGA website but that would be a neat way to go. Build a form that queries you for ingredients and percentages and then fills in the recipe in the right format.

But the BBGA is tech challenged and not great about taking members up on their offers of assistance, I think.

[Mike Nolan]

I've been thinking of a two-phase process, first a Q&A form that asks what you're making, ingredients, percentages (or quantities), number of stages, etc, then takes all that information and builds an Excel spreadsheet.

Not sure how it would handle things like a frosting or glaze that isn't directly tied to the yield, but the BBGA format doesn't seem to deal with that, either.

Most people who maintain a sourdough starter would need to just measure out the amount of starter the recipe calls for, so they may not need to know the weight of the individual components in the starter. It is still useful to know things like the hydration level of the starter to compute the hydration of the overall recipe, though.

There are probably some tools like ansible or terraform that could be used to do this. Don't know if Google Forms has the ability to do that or what other Google/Microsoft products might have that capability.

When I start using a new recipe, my wife often enters it into a program that computes carbs per serving, myfitnesspal. But the ingredients database it uses is user-maintained and sometimes it is tough to find an entry that works for the recipe, and there are entries that are just plain wrong. (And the program has a nasty habit of losing the recipe mid-way through it if you hit the wrong key.)

One of the interesting things about building a formula using baker's percentages and then computing individual ingredient quantities needed to produce the desired yield is that you don't need to worry about how many grams or ounces are in a cup, etc., since everything is by weight, or even whether the yield is in grams, ounces, kilograms or pounds.

[Mike Nolan]

Looks like the best option for a program to build Excel spreadsheets based on webform data is Python with an add-on package that can create Excel files. I've dabbled a little in Python, looks like I may need to get serious about learning it.

[Author]

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