User:Gzuufy

My main profile is on Wikipedia.

I'm currently going through baking-related recipes in the cookbook and adding weights and baker's percentages. I expect this to take quite a bit time to complete, and I'm in no particular hurry to do so.

Because I do these conversions manually, instead of with automated database lookup software such as that programmers might devise, there is the ever-present danger of mistakes. I occasionally catch my own conversion mistakes, but I encourage everyone to double check my work, we all make typos in spite of our best efforts otherwise.

A personal challenge I face in this conversion is to read some recipes that I consider, at least in a few cases, deeply flawed, in other cases, slightly flawed, and to then choose the best course of action in regards to any suggestions for improvement. My thinking has evolved on this since first starting the project, it's more about the process than any single choice.

I'm also grateful to have found a few baking recipe gems, that while they may not be perfect recipes, have provided some learning opportunities, diversion time in the kitchen, and resulted in some very good baked products.

Wikimedia Links
Sandbox.

Multiple columns

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Text to use in some notes and tables
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 * 1)    Scald milk by bringing it to at least 180 F and let it cool.

Recipes, Formulas, or Ingredient pages that caught my attention
Note: If I refer to percentages in the below, understand they are not true percentages, but usually based on flour weight, or alternatively another 100% ingredient.

Too Much Yeast
It is quite common for bread and baking recipes to have far too much yeast. It is difficult to understand why this is so. Even those published in many cookbooks, though fortunately not all, make this same basic error which negatively affects flavor so much. It is easy to presume it is simple ignorance, but many cookbook and baking books are written by experts, and when they make these same errors, it invalidates the ignorance hypothesis. Perhaps they're not experts, just big-media personalities, or perhaps they're experts who have needed to publish inferior techniques in order to please publishers, I'm not really sure. Perhaps the too much yeast commonality is as simple as trying to push fermentation times faster, since hardly anyone has time to raise dough patiently and then bake, but surely these authors can perceive that their recipes do not taste as good, nor have other desirable characteristics, as what can be purchased commercially prepared in restaurants, bakeries, or even those from large manufacturers.

One exception I've found to this is Cookbook:No-Knead Bread, though it is unspecific as to yeast type, and gives a very wide range of fermentation times (12-18 hours) at 70 °F. The reduced yeast amount will improve flavor so much. Perhaps this is why the original, long-fermented no-knead bread became so popular so quickly. Another exception is Cookbook:Baguette.

Ingredients
Cookbook:Yeast: I added extensively to Cookbook:Yeast. I may add more, later, as the coverage still misses one major concept, and temperature can probably be expanded upon, though brevity is perhaps a reasonable goal. I also found a major error, though it was simple enough, on Cookbook:Milligram.

Recipes and Formulas
Cookbook:Basic_Pizza_Crust: I wrote extensively on Cookbook_talk:Basic_Pizza_Crust, and I may want to revisit Cookbook:Basic_Pizza_Crust to repair back to original formula pursuant to the notes I made on the talk page. I believe the formula should be put back to the original ratios, and then all the volumetric measures reduced so the total dough weight is decreased. It appears a user decreased flour weight from 5- cups to 3 or 3.5, and this increased the moisture and decreased the total weight of dough. Unfortunately, it skewed all the other ratios. So, repair would be to put back to original ratios, then decrease total flour, and reconvert all volumetric measures. In addition, need to give consideration to the fact this is not "basic pizza crust", but rather is a regional style, possibly Chicago, probably deep dish of some kind. See notes on talk page for reminder, basic pizza crust would be more like Neopolitan, just a basic flour water salt yeast dough.

Cookbook:Buchteln: Far too much yeast, procedure probably/possibly not optimal, but looks like a nice dessert bread.

Cookbook:Buttermilk_Biscuits: Interesting technique, "Use all-purpose flour for rolling to avoid tasting chemicals from self-rising flour. Those chemicals would not have been sufficiently moistened on the outside of a biscuit."

Cookbook:Challah: I've never made or tasted challah (that I recall), but this looks like a reasonable formula. As is typical, it has so much yeast the yeast flavor would probably be overpowering. I've analyzed this, and it has increased water due primarily to not including supplemental egg yolks, thus it will be a lighter colored egg bread versus other formulas. It has enough sugar that better results would possibly be attained with osmotolerant yeast.

Cookbook:Cinnamon Bun and Cookbook:Cinnamon Roll: 2014-11-19. The two recipes appear identical. I can't make sense of the Cinnamon Bun recipe, originally created in 2006. The original author in revision one of Cinnamon Bun did not include any gram or weight measures. I ended up deleting "metrication" values that had amended the original recipe, the original made more sense. The dough formula is a biscuit dough, a quickbread, not yeast raised.

Cookbook:Damper This recipe uses a poorly defined "large" cup for flour, as well as a regular "cup" for the water. The large cup may be a reference to the imperial cup of 284 mL, the water may be based on a 250 mL cup, but the author may also mean something else. If the author means 284 mL for the flour, and 250 mL for the water, then without making the 1/4 cup water "scant" as it calls for, then the conversions calculate to a flour hydration of 41.73%, which is roughly equivalent to an Italian biga (as the theartisan.net defines it, not as it's defined at Wikipedia), a very low level of water for gluten development, but making the water a "scant" 1/4 cup means somewhat less than that. Due to these ambiguities, I am not able to discern the author's intent, so I am not attempting conversion on this or any related "Damper" recipes.

Cookbook:Madeira_Honey_Cake I had never heard of this cake before, my personal knowledge base tends more towards lean breads, I'm not a fan of sweets for practical dietary reasons, but this is a recipe I'd like to try someday. In my Internet searches while converting the recipe to baker's percentages, I never did find any suggestion that it should be made with sourdough, most recipes indicated a fresh yeast sponge. One recipe indicated that getting the "old dough" from the baker was the best way to get such dough "well fermented" (I believe I created an "external link" for that recipe). The language used in the recipe itself, "bread dough from the baker's shop" implies to me sourdough, as well does the process, and ingredients, particularly the baking soda. One webpage which I've now lost the link to said this dish went back to the 1500-1600s, if true, those versions were most likely sourdough, since baker's yeast hadn't yet been discovered. However, I made no note of such thinking in the recipe, as I could find no independent confirmation that modern versions are so leavened.