17.3 Basic loaf: Intro

Once you have a healthy starter, you can use it to make bread. Hooray. This also requires a bit of calculation. The main thing to keep in mind is that the starter you use means there is some portion of flour and water from the recipe already included.

I set up a Google Sheets spreadsheet to which automatically adjust the amounts based on a set of inputs. I’ll go through the formulas here, you can make your own spreadsheet if you like.

After mixing the dough, I generally follow the Basic Bread directions in terms of the rising, stretching and folding, and so forth. There is another consideration that I haven’t yet dug into: Timing the rise. There are some useful comments and a spreadsheet linked at The Fresh Loaf which gets into that. So far I’ve guesstimated, and while my loaves turn out alright, they can use some improvement.

The next two sections go through two different ways of manipulating the formulas to derive the amount of starter, flour, and water you will need.