They say that cooking is art and baking is science. I have no argument against this. I would even take it one step further.
As my middle school science teacher said nearly every day for the two years he taught me: “math is science and science is math.” And it’s true.
Baking is math.
Welcome to What Are You Working On? where we talk about (and often display) our handiwork, whether yarn and fabric crafts, woodwork, metalwork, art, or anything else “crafty”.
Baker’s math let’s you see every ingredient as proportional to the others, particularly the flour. You start with flour as 100% (if you’re using multiple types of flour, their percentages should equal 100% when added together). From there, you adjust all the other ingredients as a percentage of the flour. Once your formula is written, you add up the percentages for each ingredient (it’ll be over 100% which seems weird, but go with it), determine how much dough or batter you want to make, and then you can use that final percentage number to determine how much of each ingredient you need.
This is the basic procedure. For a better and more in-depth discussion of the subject with actual instructions, please go here.
So why learn to use this math when there are plenty of recipes that have already been tested you can follow? There is nothing wrong with following someone else’s recipe. But if you want to make something specific, something that is only yours, this is where you start.
In just a few steps and with a little work (and a digital scale), you can create your own recipe that is perfectly scalable.
- Write a formula
- Bake it
- Adjust the formula
- Repeat until your baked good looks and tastes as you want
The COO of the bakery where I work has a sign in his office that says “failure is not failure.” In baking, this is especially true. Every failure gets you closer to success. So you can turn this:
Into this:
Then into this:
And since you have that scalable formula, you can make as many or as few rolls/loaves/cakes as you want. Excel makes this even easier. With my spreadsheet, I can enter the number of dinner rolls I want to make and it will instantly calculate how much of each ingredient I need. This formula has served me very well for years of Thanksgivings, Christmases, and Easters. I even entered these sweet potato dinner rolls into the OC Fair baking competition and won first place in the dinner roll class:
I created this formula years ago. So why bring it up now?
I am extremely excited to tell you that I’ve started to repurpose this formula as a base for making the most delicious cinnamon rolls. With my sweet potato dinner roll dough and this extremely decadent filling, and this tasty glaze, I’ve created a pastry that I think might win me another ribbon.
And that’s the best thing about learning baker’s math. It gives you the freedom to make anything you can imagine.
Your turn!
Do you knit? crochet? sew? make jewelry? do metal (or other) sculpting? build furniture? create with your hands and heart?
If you do anything 'crafty' please consider doing one of our Sunday afternoon/evening diaries. You can volunteer by replying in the comments.