John <wcsjohn@aol.com> asked about the "Rose Ratio" in Rose Beranbaum's rye
bread recipe (bread-bakers.v104.n036.1), as it appears to be the same as
the Baker's Percentages for the combined (sponge + flour mixture) recipe.
In _The Bread Bible_ (pg 40), Rose defines what she calls "The Dough
Percentage". The quantities of starch, water, and fat in ingredients such
as milk and eggs are added to the flour, water and oil in the recipe before
calculating the Dough Percentages. The result is a measure of the nature
of the dough rather than a recipe for making the dough.
For example, the "Chocolate Chocolate Chip Bread" on page 106 has these
Dough Percentages:
Flour: 100% (includes the starch in the cocoa)
Water: 151.4% (includes the water in the butter and egg whites)
Salt: 1.2%
Fat: 38.5% (includes the fat in the egg yolks and cocoa)
For a bread such as the rye bread in question which contains only flour,
water, yeast, sugar, and salt, the Dough Percentages are the same as the
Baker's Percentages.
Rose had this to say on the subject Nov 3, 2003 (bread-bakers.v103.n048.1):
>I originally referred to the baker's % as "the rose ratio" but two
>scientists took issue saying that it is not actually or technically a
>ratio so I thought I'd better be safe and call it by what it is referred
>to traditionally. While I agree that the usual purpose is to be able to
>scale up and down recipes, my purpose was a little different. It was to
>show people the full amount of water, fat, and, salt including that which
>is in added ingredients so they could have a sense of what the bread would
>be like without having to make it and decide whether they might prefer a
>different type of bread or maybe even to decrease or increase the salt or
>the liquid etc. to suit their own tastes. Now I'm kinda sorry I didn't
>just leave it as "the rose ratio!"
Jeff