If The Dope gave out People of Useful Science awards Maus_Magill would be the current front runner.
[Bolding NOT mine. This post is about “Rx”, not ratios]
I remember back when I was editing video for a TV news operation. Every night we’d have a “weather shot” that was simply an exterior beauty shot of some landmark or whatever that looked nice and showed about what the weather was like around that time.
On the show rundown the slug* for the weather shot was always “WX” because who wants another too-long slug for something that everyone working there understood was a weather shot?
But whenever I refer to weather outside of a newsroom (with all its jargon) I call it “weather”, not “WX”. It just makes more sense under those circumstances.
*Slug: a short name given to a article or story that is in production.
When in doubt, always assume Monty Python.
Thank you. You are very kind.
It turns out I have two conclusions:
1 - one cup of flour should be measured at 142 grams per cup.
2 - it is entirely possible to have eaten too many cookies in a day.
Loved the science here.
When I’ve made canna-butter, I don’t do much measuring, but when I’ve tried to calculate the potency of the final product (typically cookies) I end up all over the place.
The final determination lies with my taste test. I eat a cookie. If it was waaay too potent, then maybe 1/4 cookie is “a dose”.
My gf likes low dose cookies and will eat two. One night we went to the Bulgarian-Macedonian Social Hall (a very sweet venue) for a Cajun/zydeco dance party. Seriously.
My gf was in a cookie mood. She ate two. Unbeknownst to her, I’d made a fresh batch and her dose should have been 1/2 cookie. After paying the cover charge the cookies kicked in. My gf asked me to take her home, so I did. She hasn’t had an edible in the five years since.
Next experiment is to see if this holds across various brands. 
I just looked at my Joy of Cooking from the 1980s, and it has 1 lb flour = 4 cups, which means a cup is 4 oz. I wonder if flour has changed so much in 4 decades.
Due to this experiment, I’ve put some notes on my flour canister. Next time I try converting a new recipe, I’ll up the flour quantity.
Excellent bit of science there!
I would love to see what happens if the question of humidity is put to the test, but I can’t think of a way to do that.
And across various recipes. It’s possible that the recipe is better with slightly more flour than it called for, for insurance.
It’s Tennessee. Even with the dehumidifier running, it’s 75% relative humidity in here. Yesterday, it was probably even higher. The rain was coming down in buckets.
Pride Fest was more like Mud Fest.
What I’m really curious to know is how long does it take a bag of flour with an average moisture content to settle at a higher weight as a result of atmospheric humidity, how much it actually absorbs by weight, whether or not there is also a corresponding increase in volume (other absorbent materials swell), and what difference it makes to a recipe where the other variables are controlled
Am I missing something, or are the hydration percentage formulas the standard baker’s percentage formulas, where everything is relative to the total amount of flour?
Like if you have 500 grams of flour, and your recipe calls for a 75% hydration dough, you’re looking at 375 ml of water, and everything else is listed as a percentage of that 500 grams?
Yes. 100% hydration is same weight of water to flour
So it’s really a weight recipe. It’s not like you are measuring the hydration of the dough.
Yes and no - it is a weight recipe, but the objective is not to measure hydration, it’s to control it; high hydration recipes require a different kind of handling to lower hydration, but it’s on a sort of a gradient - the higher the hydration, the more pertinent becomes the special handling.
Or to put it another way, the hydration level of a bread dough is the most significant determining factor on how it will need to be handled and how it will turn out.
I’m not really understanding what you’re getting at. The more moisture there is in the flour, the more it weighs. So the more water you’d have to use to equal that weight. Adding that equal weight of water to the wetter flour would make a wetter mixture than if you had a lower-moisture-content flour to which you’d added a lesser amount of water to equal its weight. How are these both 100% hydration?
Sure, but if flour only varies by 1% in weight from atmospheric humidity, it’s trivial, but if it varies by 30%, it’s important.
Also if the flour expands when it takes on moisture from the air, then a volume measure might be confounded in the same way as a weight measure.
Yeah, that’s just the standard nomenclature from what I’ve noticed in bread and pizzamaking circles. We talk about what hydration our dough is, with hydration being defined as what percentage, by weight, the water is to the flour. Standard bread doughs are usually around 60-65%. Like Mangetout says, once you get into the higher hydrations, the dough needs to be handled differently. At around 80% up, you’re not so much kneading the dough as slapping and folding it over itself to build gluten. With some breads, like Catalonian pan de cristal, or “glass bread,” you’re looking at 100%+ hydration, which is wet as all heck, but creates this gorgeous, wide open crumb (huge interior holes) if you know how to handle it. Like I said above, I like my pizzas at around 75% hydration where it’s on the wet side, but still handleable and creates nice airy, open bubbles in the cornicione (the edge of the crust). It also works better for the higher temperatures I tend to work with (600F+ on the grill). The other %ages I don’t worry as much about. Just need to have enough salt, and yeast will multiply given enough time. I prefer a slow rise, so I don’t use more than a half teaspoon of instant dry yeast for 500g dough, typically more like a quarter teaspoon. Yeast I don’t bother weighing. For me, the water-to-flour ratio is by far the most important.
How do you get it off the peel with such a high hydration?
Ciabatta is also an example of a high-hydration bread. You don’t knead that one at all after it starts proofing. You fold it a couple of times, and then gently shape it. When it’s done right, you get a nice, crusty bread with an open crumb that is perfect for sandwiches.
And now I want ciabatta bread.
Carefully. For something like 100%, I just build it on parchment paper and slide it off into the oven, parchment paper and all, so I don’t have to stress about it. With 75-80% pizza dough, it’s not a problem. Just a dusting of flour is enough for me, just don’t let it sit on the peel for too long. It’s not so high to be unmanageable.
Flour mills were traditionally very dry environments because of all the flour in the air. I think modern mills maintain a humidity controlled environment for consistency and safety considerations. Unfortunately an expert on flour mills I knew was lost to COVID or I could find more info about this easily. Paper flour bags I see now seem to have a some kind of coating on them, don’t know if flour is still shipped in cloth bags.
When I measured a cup at 150g it didn’t come out of the sealed plastic container where I keep bags of flour, it came from the canister I keep on the counter for general cooking purposes. Don’t know how much moisture it may have absorbed from the air since the bag was opened. Of course it’s irrelevant to making a roux because flour and oil can be adjusted during cooking for the desired consistency.