alt Hacker News> Viewed through this lens, the modern illusion of control shatters, but something much more liberating takes its place. The recipe is a suggestion. The rules of baking — baker’s percentages, hydration levels, the established ratio of flour-to-water-to-fat — are the underlying framework. This is the scaffolding.
Look, the author isn't technically wrong. But also, I have to point out that the reason for all the control and preciseness is replicability.
If you measure out everything by gram, mix/kneed for the right amount of time, set the temperature the the right number, and bake for the right amount of time, you'll get the same loaf, texture, everything, every single time.
That's why we have modern store bread loafs. That's why all bakeries aren't using more "artistic" methods of intuiting the amount of ingredients.
So long as you can accept that by doing thing by feel you'll end up with loaves that are rocks, crumbs, or dough balls. That are overcooked or undercooked. Then yeah, you can intuit as much as you like. Sometimes you'll get something good. You'll even get better at it till you usually get something good.
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The whole obsession about measuring giving exact hydration percentages is strange to me.
Assume you have 100g of flour at equilibrium 20% ambient humidity, and the same 100g of flour at 80% humidity.
I don’t know how different the effective moisture content would be, but measuring the weight of the flour to the gram seems like you’re including the moisture in the weight of the flour. Maybe one packs denser on a scoop. I don’t know. But I don’t necessarily think it’s more accurate.
On the other hand, it’s really easy to just pour in 540g of flour, mix in a shy tablespoon of salt, 280g of water, and a good glop of starter. Far easier than trying to get consistent scoops or measure to the meniscus in a liquid measured.
I worked at a culinary school for a while. In the bread kitchen they taught you the formula stuff, but also, to recognize what the dough would feel like, look like, even taste like, when it was right. They taught you how to adapt if the flour was a little drier today than yesterday, if the kitchen was a little more humid.
> You'll even get better at it till you usually get something good.
This is the crux.
Sure, if I bake a loaf of odd bread every couple of days, I will EVENTUALLY get good enough to produce something good rather than just edible. After how long? A week? A month? A YEAR?
So, in the interim, I am WASTING those ingredients and my time.
I liken this to knife sharpening. Sure, EVENTUALLY you will get the feel for sharpening on whetstones and then sharpening your kitchen knives is quick and straightforward. But how many times will it take--especially if you have no mentor to teach you? Alternatively, you can get a fixed-angle sharpener and have sharp kitchen knives tonight.
Reproducibility requires more than just measuring ingredients, however, as other characteristics can greatly change results. Leaven viability, flour moisture content, relative humidity, ambient temperature, and accidents of a home-baker's process (did you get interrupted by a child / work / partner / household exigency during your dough prep or bake) all have pretty sharp impacts on results.
Precise reproducibility requires not just monitoring ingredients, but overall environment, dough response, and more.
Or ... you can roll with it as an amateur (both in the "nonprofessional" and "for the love of it" senses), recognise that every bake is its own experiment, measure what you can, but allow for variation. I've been baking bread for about six years now. Results vary, many look great, and all but a very few taste amazing, even where I go far out of nominal parameters.
Biggest goof to date was omitting salt from a batch. (Salting the finished product ... recovered mostly.) Otherwise I've survived odd assortments of flours, accelerated or extended prooving cycles, high- or low-temperature ovens, different cookware, and more. Bread is just really freaking resilient stuff, and so long as you're not planning on hitting the same spot every time, have fun with it, and learn, in the spirit of TFA.