1/3 Calculating Flour Weight 2

Explain 3 factors of correctly calculating the flour weight.

Since most bread is made up of only four basic ingredients, flour, water, salt and yeast, it is small changes in the way the ingredients are combined that makes one loaf different from the other. The flour is always 100% and the weight of each ingredient is a percentage of the flour weight. The flour will always be the magic number you need to multiply or divide therefore three factors of correctly calculating Flour weight are:

The reason it is important to Calculate flour weight is that the texture of various flours and the degree to which they are compacted affect how much or how little space they may take up. Weighing flour leaves less room for error. Flour is the main ingredient in the baker’s percentage, and as such is considered 100%. If more than one flour is used in a formula, the combined total is 100%.
*As an example, in a formula calling for 400g of bakers flour and 100g of low g.i concentrate flour, the bakers flour would be stated as 80%, the low g.i concentrate flour as 20%, and the combined total of 500g of flour as 100%. The weight of each ingredient, other than the flour, is expressed as a percentage of the total flour weight. In other words, each ingredient in a formula is independently calculated and shown as a percentage of the flour in that same formula.
*This is just an example of a weigh up for a reciepe, not the correct weigh up.

Correctly calculating flour weight allows a baker to resize a recipe easily in accordance with other ingredients. This determines how much salt, improver; yeast etc. needs to be mixed into the dough, by doing so this helps to balance a dough and also falls into accordance of getting a correct yield. Also taking into account the desired amount of water needed to be mixed within the dough, thus creating absorption of water into the flour. For example, water is necessary for making bread, too much water causes a dough to be slack, and too less water causes a dough to be tight.

And finally correctly calculating flour weight determines how much wasteage there will be. Simply put, if too much flour is used within a dough, then there will be more excess waste which is not needed. So correctly calculating flour weight can help cut back on wastage and costs of ingredients and flour. Bakeries determine wastage and cost by production sheets. The amount of production baked within a day is recorded onto a production sheet. At the conclusion of the day, the amount of production not sold is recorded also. By doing so determines what days are busier, i.e. selling more product, and how much approximately should be made on that day.