John,
Howdy! Welcome to the Board.
Now, let the joust begin!
Tunaoue wrote:
The volume of water increase was because of your experience of how much more moisture you needed to achieve the same "feel", correct?
Correct
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Did you use the SAME SCALE to weight you ingredients? Were they different? If so I suggest taking a solid object and measure the weight on both to check for consistency. The scale and linearity may be off on one (or both)
Nope, they were different scales. Which bring up another reason you can't accurately follow another person's written recipe by weight: their scale may be calibrated differently from yours.
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Also, no one brought up the subject of the cold flour versus room temp. Moisture condensation could have occurred. Moisture could have infiltrated during its time in the 'fridge.
Other way around. The unrefrigerated flour was kept at 80% relative humidity. The flour in the fridge was in a house with 30% relative humidity, and the fridge is generally dryer than the surrounding air, so that flour was probably at around 20% humidity.
I don't know the relative water absorption of flour based on ambient humidity, but I can tell you from repeated experience that it makes a dramatic (as much as 50%) difference in the amount of water you need in a bread recipe.
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Second rule: all volume measurements of flour(s) are sifted quantities.
This is for two reasons: packing flour into a cup creates an unknown variable of density. The uncertainty of how much flour you have is greater. With sifting, the results have a lesser degree of uncertainty. Also there is the argument of mixability. With sifted flour, it is free of clumps and is more prepared for mixing with other ingredients.
In this case I was using dip-and-sweep measuring method from two bags of flour from the same flour mill of the same age, so I suspect variance based on the measuring technique was fairly minor.
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In your story you're saying you have about 6 ounces less actual flour. That's an alarmingly high degree of inconsistency. I don't doubt your need for more moisture. I do question the other factors that were involved.
I am certain that other factors were involved, all of them leading to less accuracy for the same written recipe. Among other things, the altitude was different too, by about 1800 feet, and the hardness of the water was different. However, there were fewere. variables in this case then there could otherwise have been. I was the recipe writer, so no chance of misinterpretation. The flour was from the same source and month of milling.
So, let me do the math:
To 18oz of the wet flour, I added 16oz of water. This resulted in about 34oz of dough.
To 18oz of the dry flour, I had to add 22 oz of water to achieve the same texture. This resulted in about 40oz of dough.
So if you look at it from a perspective of the desired weight of the dough, it's actually a smaller amount, a difference of about 20%. That's still a pretty dramatic difference as far as accuracy is concerned. In order to get the desired 34oz of dough, I would have had to start with 15oz of flour and 19oz of water -- an 18% decrease in the amount of flour.
This doesn't really prove that measuring my weight is
less accurate, just that real accuracy in measurement is not achievable with a common written recipe, whether weight or volume is used. The information not contained in the recipe leads to variations which are greater than any increase in accuracy given to us by any particular method of measurement.
