17.1 Basics

If you read some websites or books about bread, you may come across terms like hydration, inoculation, and some others. I’ll describe some of these terms, and include some formulas and calculations. Mainly the calculations are used for me to know how much flour and water to add when I feed my sourdough starter, and then use it to make a batch of bread.

• Hydration: The ratio of water to flour in the recipe, usually expressed as a percentage. So if you use 100 g of flour and 60 g of water, the hydration is \(H = W/F = 60 / 100 = 0.60\) or \(60\%\).

• Inoculation: For sourdough, this is the percentage of the total flour which comes from the starter.

• Baker’s percent: The amount of an ingredient relative to the amount of flour. This is exactly like the hydration, but the hydration is specifically about the liquid, the baker’s percent is for any ingredient.

Using and maintaining your sourdough starter means keeping track of the hydration so that you know how much flour and water are in it, so that you know how much flour and water to add when you want to bake a loaf. I’ll start with calculations for maintaining the starter, and then into using a started to make a loaf of bread.