Recipe #242
I finally made a recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. I bought the book a few months ago, read it, and put it on a shelf. It scared me a bit. Don’t get me wrong, its a very beautiful book and full of good information and formulas. Yes, formulas–not recipes. There’s something called baker’s math. Each ingredient is based on its proportion to flour which is always 100%. For example the basic formula for classic French bread is: 100% flour, 60% water, 2% salt,and 2% yeast. Formulas are useful for determining the amount of each ingredient you need for the amount of bread you want to make (the Total Weight(TW)). With the TW and the formula for the type of bread you want to make, you can figure out how much of each ingredient you need. Total Percentage(TP) is the sum of each Ingredient Percentage (IP) and is always more than 100%.
Total Flour Weight (TFW)=TW ÷ TP
Ingredient Weight (IW)=IP x TFW
IP=IW ÷TFW x 100
Have I confused you yet? Good. Now you know why this book sat unused. To be fair, the book does give measures and weights for each base formula; you don’t need to figure out the math to make bread.But b/c I am who I am I did.
The formula for English muffins is: 100% bread flour, 2.5% sugar, 1.9 % salt, 1.4% instant yeast, 5% butter, and approximately 70% milk for a TP of 180.8%.
For our Sunday breakfast I made our own version of egg mcmuffins. 😛
Pink Stripes 
I’m getting ready to bake these, checked out your whole wheat version (I’m going to be adding whole grain somehow) and clicked to this post for the original English muffin formula. Love the post! Love the math!