Bread & Sourdough Formulas: Total Hydration, Starter Builds, Dough Temperature & Timing

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Split Ada's levain into its flour and water, add them to the recipe card and find the dough's true hydration and salt percentage – the numbers the card itself hides.
• Add up the levain for Saturday's three bakes, add a buffer, look up the parts of the chosen feeding ratio, turn them into grams and work back to the time Ada has to feed her starter the evening before.
• Measure how much of the recipe's flour is prefermented, rewrite the recipe for Ada's stiff starter without changing the dough, and size the levain for a milder loaf.
• Look up the friction of each mixing method, calculate the water temperature for five bakes so each dough lands at 25 °C, convert it to °F and measure the real friction of Ada's mixer from a test batch.
• Use a fictional halving rule to see how kitchen temperature changes bulk fermentation, then plan Sunday's bake backwards from the moment the loaves go into the oven, across midnight.
• Weigh the seeds of Ada's multigrain loaf as percentages of the flour, give each a soaker with its own water, total the soaker water and find the final dough weight.
• Divide a market-day batch into full loaves, see what is left for rolls, measure the pooled bake loss of five test loaves and set the scaling weight that bakes out at 800 g.
• Average Ada's scores by hydration band with AVERAGEIFS, let a formula name the best band, check it at the warmer dough temperatures and chart hydration against score.