Make your own Bread Formula

Yes, you can do it!

When I started in cooking and then baking, I didn’t know where recipes and formulas came from. I thought you had to be someone special to come up with a recipe. We’re all special in our own ways. You’re going to come up with something different than I would. That’s what makes food so interesting. But I still wondered how bakers came up with all these different breads. There are some basic parameters to making bread. You don’t have to adhere to them strictly but once you see where the basic formulas come from, you can make up your own. Perhaps you like a denser bread or one that has a certain mouth-feel. You can achieve that. It does take some practice but it is learnable. The one important piece of equipment you’ll need is your scale. This will not work with cups and teaspoons. You’ll also need a calculator.

Decide what kind of bread you want to make

What kind of bread do you want to make? I have talked at length in this blog about lean doughs and rich doughs. To recap, lean doughs don’t have any or very little fat or sugar. Some people think they are boring and I disagree. Lean breads can offer great crust, good stretchy interiors and are better for you health-wise. Rich breads are the ones most folks like making and enjoy eating. They are the brioches and cinnamon rolls with fat, sugar, eggs and other enriching ingredients. They can be strong breads but they have shorter gluten strands which changes the mouth-feel a lot. They melt in your mouth. They are generally for celebration or special occasions. 

Let’s start with how you might make up a formula for a lean bread. We’ll touch on formulating rich doughs in a subsequent post. I’m going to give you some numbers. These are just guidelines. You have to decide what works best for you over several trials of each formula. Here’s a simple pizza dough or French bread formula:

500g bread flour 100%

300g water 60%

10g kosher salt 2%

10g instant yeast 2%

I want to talk about percentages as well here. If you notice, 300g is 60% of 500g. (300 ÷ 500= .60 or 60%) Let’s assume that the 500g of flour is 100%. The flour needs to add up to 100% in every formula even if you are using multiple flours. More on that later. 

Why is that important? It shows me what kind of dough this is going to be. It’s a relatively dry dough. Most doughs fall between 59% and 80% water or what bakers call hydration. This one falls on the dry side. We’ll talk about the higher hydration or wetter doughs next. Also notice that the salt and yeast are 2% of the 500g of flour. These are pretty standard measurements as well. Most doughs, whether high or low hydration, use 2% for each of those ingredients. If you put all those ingredients in a bowl and mixed it up, you would get a very firm dough. This a good place to start for beginners. 

What if we increased the hydration to 65% in this dough? How would that affect the texture and flavor of the bread. It wouldn’t affect the flavor that much but it would change the way the baked bread feels when you chew it. So in some ways, very subtle as they may be, it does affect flavor. At 65% hydration the dough is easier to work on the bench. But some beginners might find it a bit sticky. This can be off-putting to beginning bakers. Using a bit of flour on your hands and a bench scraper can work wonders when you start mixing dough. 

After the dough ferments for a while, you’ll be able to handle the wetter doughs with wet hands and quick manipulation. So doughs in the 59%-65% range are pretty dry and don’t need much special handling. What if we went up to 75% hydration. If you felt that 65% is sticky, 75% will be very sticky. But as I mentioned before, with fermentation comes gluten development. You might think it would be very hard to handle. Wetting your hands and using a bench scraper will allow you to handle these high hydration doughs. Through a series of stretches and fold, you’ll develop gluten. With more gluten development, your dough will be stronger and be able to trap the gas produced by the yeast. With more water, you’ll find the resulting crumb or feel of the dough is more open. It might be hard to conceive of how a wet dough will give you a more open dough. But think of it like this. When a well proofed dough with great gluten development goes in the oven with 75% hydration, the extra water gives the dough plenty of opportunity to expand in the oven. If the dough is tight, like with a 60% hydration, it has no where to expand. With the added water, the dough can expand like a balloon. During the baking process, the water turns to steam, evaporates and you are left with a beautiful crumb and crispy crust.

So the first way to make your own formula is determine what hydration does to your bread and experiment changing up the hydration level. Keep the flour, salt and yeast consistent. 

Stick to the basics 

By changing only one variable each time you make a bread formula, you’ll get a better sense of what that variable is doing to your bread. But let’s assume you have gotten some proficiency at making French bread at different hydration levels. Where can you go from here? I would suggest not changing that much. The noted architect, Mies van der Rohe famously said, “Less is more.” And I think this applies to cooking and bread in specific. Sure you can add a bunch of herbs, cheese, nuts or any number of ingredients to your bread formula but this will result in a muddy, unfocused flavor and texture. I think focusing on texture in both the crumb and the crust while developing flavor in your bread through long fermentation is preferable. This will show off your talent as a baker more than added herbs or flavors ever will. How can you change up your bread other than changing hydration level? 

One way to change flavor and texture in a simple French bread is to change the flour. You should be using bread flour to make your bread. But you can use other flours like whole wheat, rye and spelt to enhance the depth of flavor. All three of those flours have gluten like the bread flour you are using for the base of your dough. The gluten in these flours is a bit different but they will help your development for the most part. But you can use non-gluten flours in small amounts in your bread. I like using buckwheat flour. There’s no gluten in buckwheat. So you would not use more than 15%-20% in a dough. More than 20% of a non-gluten flour will result in a very dense boring loaf of bread. 

Other flours to consider would be quinoa, amaranth, potato and teff. Teff is particularly interesting. It’s actually a whole grain. But it’s very tiny. Teff is the flour that is used in Ethiopian cooking to make the injera bread that is eaten at every meal. It’s great to use in yeast breads as well. But because it doesn’t have any gluten, you’ll need to use bread flour. Remember the flours need to add up to 100% in every formula. If you have 10% non-gluten flour, you will use 90% bread flour. This even goes for gluten flours like whole wheat. You can make a 100% whole wheat bread, but the texture is not great. The same goes for rye flour. You’ll want to use no more than 25% of whole wheat or rye. You could go with a combination of rye and whole wheat for your 25%. Here’s a sample formula:

Bread flour 75% 375g

Rye flour 10% 50g

Whole wheat flour 15% 75g

Water 67% 335g

Kosher salt 2% 10g

Instant yeast 2% 10g

You’ll notice that in increased the water a bit when I added rye and whole wheat to my formula. This is because whole wheat and rye absorb more water as you mix them. You may find you like even more water in those doughs. But we have essentially the same dough I laid out in the first example. 

Try some different flavors you like

Let’s look into the future by just a few months. You have made multiple batches of French dough, varying the hydration every few times. You have determined what texture you like the best. You have tried combinations of flours in your doughs by using one or more flours. You’re ready to start added some other flavors to your dough. I tend to like things pretty plain. But if you did want to add some herbs to the mix, I wouldn’t discourage it at this point. You might just start with one dry herb. Using fresh herbs might seem like a better idea, but they lack the flavor punch that dry herbs pack. What percentage should you use? Start with 1%. You might not even taste them that much. Gradually increase the percentage until you reach the flavor you like. The herbs I like to use are oregano, rosemary and tarragon. I have found that dry basil tastes strange to me in a bread dough. Do your own trials though. You may find an herb or combination that really appeals to you. Another flavor that many people want to add to their bread is garlic. I love garlic but it just gets lost in bread dough. The flour is just overpowering. One way to overcome this smothering effect by the flour is to roast the garlic first. This increases the flavor and texture of the garlic. You’ll need quite a bit to get that strong garlic flavor in your bread. Start with 5%. I think a better way to get that garlic flavor is to serve your bread with a roasted garlic butter. The same goes for cheese. I would not recommend adding cheese to your dough. But serving cheese with your crusty bread is the best!

I hope you give making your own formula a chance. Even if it’s not perfect on the first try, give it another shot. Remember to stick to the basics. Flour is 100%. Yeast and salt are 2% and water should be between 59% and 80%. Let me know what your results are. What were your successes and where were your challenges? 

Chef Tom