Tag: Bread Dough

  • When Should You Start That Dough? The Bake Planner Does the Fermentation Math for You

    Knead to Know

    When Should You Start That Dough? The Bake Planner Does the Fermentation Math for You

    A free tool that works backward from your deadline, or forward from right now, so you’re not doing fermentation math on the back of a flour bag.

    A while back I was planning a pizza night for a group big enough to need 24 dough balls. Not a professional job, just an ambitious weekend, and these days a fairly rare one for me. I haven’t worked regularly as a pizzaiolo in a while, so I’m a bit out of rhythm with the pace real volume demands. I sat down to work out when to start the dough so everything would be ready by eight, and it turned into more arithmetic than I expected: bulk rise, balling, a cold rest in the fridge, coming back to room temperature, then the actual baking, and that last part multiplied by however many pizzas my oven could hold at once.

    I got there eventually, on paper, with a few crossings-out. The evening went well in the end — but if I’m honest, it wasn’t just the arithmetic that saved it. It was also falling back on old habits from my training: a feel for when dough is actually ready that no formula fully replaces, and enough experience to sense when a number on paper needed a second look. That’s the part that bothered me afterward. Someone without that background, facing the exact same 24-pizza evening, wouldn’t have that instinct to lean on when the numbers got complicated. That’s exactly who I built this for.

    So I built the tool I was missing

    The Bake Planner is a free tool (a bulk fermentation calculator, really, though it covers the full schedule rather than just that one stage) that does that timing math for you, for both bread and pizza. You can ask it two different questions, depending on what you actually know at the moment:

    “I want to be done by a certain time: tell me when to start.” Or the other way around: “I’m starting right now: tell me when I’ll be done.” Either way, it walks the whole process forward or backward and hands you a clock time for every stage, not just a total duration.

    Your kitchen isn’t a lab, so the tool doesn’t assume it is

    Rise time is famously temperature-sensitive, and most timelines you find online quietly assume a kitchen that doesn’t exist — a fixed 21°C, every time. The Bake Planner asks for your actual room temperature and adjusts from there, using the rule of thumb that rise time roughly doubles for every 10°C you drop.

    Tip: planning a long, cold rest in the fridge? Use chilled water when you mix, not straight from the tap. Room-temperature water can push your final dough temperature up before the fridge ever gets a chance to slow things down, and cooler dough at the mixing stage also helps gluten development. Worth checking, too: an older fridge often runs warmer than its dial claims, since cooling capacity fades with age. A cheap fridge thermometer beats a guess every time. A thermometer doesn’t lie.

    The part that actually started this: batch size and oven capacity

    That 24-pizza evening is exactly why the Bake Planner asks how many loaves or pizzas you’re making, and how many your oven fits per bake. I had two ovens going that night, one pizza at a time in each, so two pizzas per bake, not twenty-four. Twenty-four pizzas at that capacity is twelve sequential bakes, and that adds up to real time most timelines never account for. The same math applies to bread: twenty loaves with room for four at a time isn’t one bake either, it’s five. The tool does that multiplication for you and shows it plainly in the schedule, instead of leaving you to discover it the way I did, mid-evening, with a countertop full of dough.

    And the flour question follows you here too

    Long, slow rises (the kind that go 8 hours or more, often in the fridge) need flour strong enough to hold up over that stretch, the same theme I got into in Pizza Dough or Bread Dough?. So whenever you plan a rise that long, the Bake Planner asks about your flour: a W-value if you’re working with Italian flour, or just the protein percentage off any nutrition label if you’re not, since (as I got into in Flour Power) not every country prints a W-value on the bag. Either way, it tells you plainly whether what’s in your cupboard can actually carry the schedule you’ve just built.

    One honest disclaimer

    None of this makes the Bake Planner an exact science. It’s a good indication of when to start or when you’ll be done, not a guarantee — your kitchen, your flour, and your oven all have the final word. If you’re a newer baker with ambitious plans, build in some extra margin rather than cutting it close. Something will eventually go differently than planned; that part is going to happen to you regardless of how carefully you calculate. But everything you can plan for with room to spare should stay enjoyable, because that’s what makes baking worth doing in the first place, that, and the good bread and pizza everyone gets to eat afterward.

    Run a baking blog or site of your own? The Bake Planner is also available as a free embed, so you can drop the whole tool straight into your own page for your readers to use, no coding needed on your end. Get in touch and I’ll send over the code.

    It’s free, it’s on the site now, and it’s already saved me from doing that 24-pizza arithmetic by hand a second time.

    — Rob

  • Pizza Dough or Bread Dough? Why Your Flour Decides More Than Your Recipe Does

    Knead to Know

    Pizza Dough or Bread Dough? Why Your Flour Decides More Than Your Recipe Does

    A 67% hydration pizza recipe that also makes a very good loaf of bread, and why that only works with the right flour.

    For years I kept my own pizza dough recipe at 67% hydration. That’s what I settled on through training and trial and error, and it’s what I still reach for most weekends. At some point, more or less by accident, I used the same dough to bake a loaf of bread instead of shaping it into rounds. It worked. Not “edible, if you squint” worked — genuinely good bread, with a proper open crumb. What came out of the oven was, essentially, a ciabatta.

    That shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did. But it took me a while to figure out why it worked at all.

    Tip: got a few pizza dough balls left over at the end of a session? Shape and bake them off as ciabatta. They’re perfect as a closing bite with drinks, or saved for the next day.

    The percentage never lied, the flour did

    My first assumption was the obvious one: pizza dough and bread dough are just different things, built for different hydration ranges, and what happened with that 67% dough was a lucky exception. That assumption didn’t survive contact with a second experiment.

    I tried the exact same recipe again, same percentages, same method, except this time with ordinary supermarket wheat flour instead of what I’d used before. The dough never came together properly. It stayed wet, slack, impossible to shape. Same numbers on paper, completely different dough in my hands.

    The recipe hadn’t changed. The flour had. That was the actual variable all along — not whether I was calling it pizza or calling it bread.

    What made the difference

    The flour behind that original 67% dough was Pinsa Romana, a patented Italian flour blend built specifically to handle high hydration. It mixes wheat flour, rice flour, and soy flour with a touch of dried sourdough, and the combination lets the dough hold onto far more water than a standard flour can, while staying light and easy to work with.

    I’m not going to get into the full story of Pinsa Romana here. It deserves its own post, and it’s getting one. For now, the relevant point is narrower: that flour is engineered to absorb water most flours simply can’t.

    Why the same recipe failed with supermarket flour

    Which is exactly what I ran into. Standard wheat flour from the supermarket doesn’t have anywhere near the same water-holding capacity. Push it to 67% hydration and it doesn’t turn into a lighter, airier dough. It just stays too wet, because the flour can’t absorb what the recipe is asking of it.

    So the recipe wasn’t wrong. It was just written for a flour that could carry it, and I’d swapped in a flour that couldn’t.

    Strength decides your ceiling, not a chart

    This connects directly to something I wrote about in Flour Power: A World Tour of the Bag You Reach For Every Day: 00, T55, Type 550 and a plain protein percentage are all measuring different things, and none of them hand you a ready-made answer for how much water your dough can take. That was deliberate. There isn’t a universal chart that says “this flour, this hydration.” Strength is something you find out by working with the dough in front of you, not something you look up.

    My Pinsa Romana dough and my supermarket-flour dough prove the same point from opposite directions: the ceiling on hydration is set by the flour’s strength, not by whether what you’re making is called pizza or bread. If you want a deeper technical breakdown of the baker’s percentage math itself, Weekend Bakery has a genuinely excellent explanation of it, and it’s well worth the read if you want the full picture behind these numbers.

    Why I built two different starting points

    This is also why Baker Calculator’s pizza dough recipe sits at a deliberately modest 54% hydration, built around an ordinary, medium-strong Tipo 00. It’s a flour nearly anyone can buy, and a hydration it can handle without complaint. It’s not the most exciting number I could have chosen. It’s the one that works reliably on the first try, regardless of which bag of flour you’re holding.

    From there, it’s on you to find your own ceiling, the same way I found mine. Use a stronger flour, push the hydration up in small steps, and pay attention to how the dough behaves at each stage rather than chasing a percentage for its own sake. That’s where a dough like my 67% Pinsa Romana version comes from: not a formula, but testing what a specific flour could actually carry.

    More on Pinsa Romana itself soon. There’s a lot more to that flour than fits here.

    — Rob

  • Flour Power: A World Tour of the Bag You Reach For Every Day

    Knead to Know

    Flour Power: A World Tour of the Bag You Reach For Every Day

    Flour isn’t flour isn’t flour. Here’s what those numbers on the bag actually mean, and why they don’t mean what most people think.

    Every country seems to have invented its own way of labeling flour, and none of them agree with each other. Italian “00,” French “T55,” German “Type 550,” a bag from the supermarket that just says “all-purpose” — they can all be, more or less, the same flour wearing a different passport. Or they can be completely different animals. The only way to know is to understand what each system is actually measuring.

    That’s the part that trips people up, so let’s start there.

    These numbers aren’t all measuring the same thing

    This is the single most common misunderstanding I run into: people assume a French T65 or German Type 1050 tells you how strong the flour is: how much gluten it can develop, how much water it can hold. It doesn’t. Those numbers measure ash content: literally, how much mineral residue is left over when a lab burns a sample of the flour. More bran in the mix means more minerals, means a higher number.

    You can have a T55 at 10% protein and a T55 at 13% protein from two different mills. The number tells you about the bran, not the gluten. I learned this the hard way, swapping in a “similar-numbered” flour for a recipe and getting a completely different dough.

    Italy’s system works differently again: 00, 0, 1, 2, and Integrale describe how finely and how thoroughly the bran and germ have been sifted out, not ash content directly, though the two tend to move together. And the Netherlands, US, and UK skip type numbers almost entirely and just print the protein percentage on the bag, which is closer to what most home bakers actually want to know.

    Three different questions, three different answers. None of them wrong — just not interchangeable.

    Italy: refinement, not protein

    The Italian system (00, 0, 1, 2, Integrale) is about how much of the whole grain stays in the bag. “00” is the most refined: fine, white, almost entirely the starchy endosperm, no bran or germ to speak of. It’s what most pizzerias reach for, including the training I did myself. “Integrale” is the other end: full wholemeal, everything left in. The numbers in between are steps along that same road.

    What trips people up: 00 doesn’t automatically mean weak, and it doesn’t automatically mean strong. Italian mills sell 00 flour at a whole range of protein levels: a soft 00 for cakes and a strong 00 built for 24-hour pizza dough are both technically “00.” Always check the protein percentage on the bag itself, not just the type.

    France: T45 through T150

    T45 is the palest, finest, lowest-ash flour, built for pastry and enriched, buttery doughs, not for a chewy sourdough. T55 is the everyday workhorse, roughly what a good all-purpose flour gives you, and the base for a classic baguette. T65 is the one most French country-style sourdough (pain de campagne) is built on. A bit more bran, a bit more flavor, still very manageable. T80, T110, and T150 climb steadily toward full wholemeal.

    Germany, Austria, Switzerland: Type 405 to Type 1600

    Same idea as France, same ash-content logic, just with numbers roughly ten times larger. A French T55 and a German Type 550 are, in practice, close cousins. Type 405 is the fine, low-ash flour for cakes and pastries. Type 550 is the standard bread flour. Type 1050 and up move into darker, more rustic, more mineral-rich territory, with Type 1600 landing at essentially whole wheat.

    A rough translation table

    None of these line up perfectly (ash content and refinement aren’t measuring identical things), but if you need a reasonable substitute for your everyday baking flour, this is the neighborhood to look in:

    Everyday white / bread flourPastry / cake flourRustic / high-extraction
    Italy: 00 or 0Italy: 00 (soft wheat)Italy: 1, 2, Integrale
    France: T55France: T45France: T80–T150
    Germany: Type 550Germany: Type 405Germany: Type 1050–1600
    NL / US / UK: ~11–12% proteinNL / US / UK: ~8–9% proteinNL / US / UK: “whole wheat”

    Rye and spelt play by their own rules

    Worth a quick, separate mention: rye and spelt aren’t just “different wheat.” Rye develops very little of the gluten structure wheat does, absorbs water differently, and behaves nothing like a wheat dough even at matching hydration. Rye is a classic in Northern and Eastern European baking, and worth its own deep dive another time. Spelt, an ancient relative of modern wheat, has a more fragile gluten structure that tears more easily but ferments beautifully. Neither one substitutes 1:1 for wheat flour without adjustment.

    Whatever’s in your bag, the flour type field on the calculator is there so you can note exactly what you used (Type 550, T65, 00, or something with a name I’ve never heard of) right alongside the recipe. Six months from now, when the loaf turns out perfectly, you’ll actually know why.

    — Rob

  • Hydration by Bread Type: A Quick Reference

    Knead to Know

    Hydration by Bread Type: A Quick Reference

    The question I get asked more than any other: “what hydration should I use for X?” Here’s my go-to answer.

    If there’s one question that comes up more than anything else (from friends, from people at the market, from the comments under just about every bread photo I post), it’s this: “What hydration did you use for that?”

    There’s no single right answer, because it depends on the bread. A bagel and a ciabatta are both technically “dough,” but they behave nothing alike, and that’s almost entirely down to how much water is in them. So here’s the reference table I wish someone had handed me years ago: the range I actually start from for each type, before adjusting for my own flour and kitchen.

    Bread typeTypical hydrationWhat you get
    Bagels50–58%Dense, chewy, holds its shape through boiling
    Soft pretzels50–55%Firm enough to shape and twist without collapsing
    Sandwich / pan loaf60–65%Even, tight crumb, easy to slice
    Pizza dough60–65%Workable by hand, still stretches thin without tearing
    Baguette65–70%Open-ish crumb, crisp crust, still shapeable
    Sourdough country loaf70–75%Balance of open crumb and a dough you can still handle
    Focaccia75–85%Soft, dimpled, almost pours into the pan
    Ciabatta75–85%Big irregular holes, thin crisp crust

    These are starting ranges, not rules carved in stone. Treat them as where to begin, not where you have to land.

    Your flour moves the range

    I wrote about this in more detail on the calculator page itself, but it’s worth repeating here: these percentages assume a reasonably standard flour. A weak, low-protein flour will struggle to hold the top end of any of these ranges: you’ll end up with a puddle, not a dough. A strong bread flour can often go higher than the range suggests. The table gets you in the right neighborhood; your own flour decides how far you can push it.

    Hydration isn’t the whole story — watch your dough temperature too

    Get the hydration right and your dough can still fight you if the temperature is off. The percentage in the table above tells you how much water to use. It says nothing about how warm that water should be, and that turns out to matter just as much.

    Every time you mix dough, by hand or in a machine, you add heat to it through friction. The more vigorously you mix, and the longer it takes, the warmer your dough ends up, regardless of what temperature the water started at. It’s your final dough temperature, not your water temperature, that actually drives how the dough ferments.

    I remember checking mine with a probe thermometer straight out of the mixer the first time: 30°C (86°F). Fine to eat, but far too warm for a controlled rise — everything happens too fast and too unevenly.

    The fix is entirely in your hands, literally. Adjust the temperature of the water you mix with, not the recipe. If your dough keeps coming out too warm, cool the water down; a can of water left in the fridge is often enough. Mix again, check the final dough temperature, and take note. Over a few attempts you’ll find the water temperature that gets your dough where you want it, for your specific mixing method and time. Mine landed around 6°C (43°F) water for a 23°C (73°F) finished dough, mixing by hand for about ten minutes. Yours will likely be different, since it depends on your kitchen, your mixer or your hands, and how long you knead.

    This is exactly what the notes field on the calculator is for. Once you’ve found the water temperature and mixing time that work for you, write it down next to the recipe (“water at 6°C (43°F), hand-mixed 10 minutes”) so next time you don’t have to rediscover it from scratch.

    If you’re moving up the table

    Say your usual sandwich loaf sits at 62% and you want to try your hand at ciabatta. Don’t jump straight to 80%. Increase in small steps of 2–3% at a time, bake, see how the dough behaved, and adjust again. It’s slower than just guessing, but it’s the difference between a dough you can actually shape and one that ends up as a sticky mess on your counter.

    Whatever you’re making, plug your flour weight into the calculator, drag the hydration slider to your target, and let it work out the water for you. If it turns out well, or if it doesn’t, the notes field is there so you remember what you actually did next time.

    — Rob


    I go into more of the “why” behind this (the training, the theory) in an earlier post.