Mitchell, your pizza looks glorious and I'm ready to head to the kitchen and get started. But here's a question I have, not just for you but very frequently with US ingredients listed in metric: Why the very specific 333 grams of flour and 333 grams of water? What happens if I miss a beat and add 334 or even 335 grams of flour? Or am I aiming for equal metric quantities of flour and water and the 333 grams really doesn't matter so much? Could I go as high as 350 grams? This all sounds very silly but I'm honestly quite serious in asking it. You are not alone in your specificity, by any means. Call me: Puzzled in Maine
Hi Nancy. Interesting comment/question. Two thoughts come to mind. The first is that bakers use bakers' percentages for their recipes/ratios/formulas, which allow them to easily scale up or down accurately. These percentages are unique in that all ingredients in a bread formula are indicated as a percentage of the total flour in the recipe, rather than everything adding up to 100%. My pizza dough recipe, as most home sourdough recipes, is based on 1 kilogram of flour (1000g), which is enough for two nice sized loaves or five individual pizzas. (A kilo of flour is about as small as you can go to get proper fermentation; some bakers have told me 2,500 g produces better results.) When I made the pizza formula to 1000 g of flour, the crust was too thick in my pan by a third, so I wanted to cut the formula to 2/3, hence the calculation of 667 g total flour in the end, and everything scaled to that. I will say that even though I grew up in Canada in an American family, making me equally comfortable in metric and imperial units (ambimetric?), it wasn't until I started baking bread a few years ago that I started using metric weights for baking recipes (not just bread, but also cakes and cookies) and it changed my life. It is so easy to scale up or scale down using ratios for different pan sizes, yields, etc. Plus no measuring utensils to clean—you just add everything to a bowl and tare the scale between additions. I can't believe everyone doesn't bake like this. More than 30 years ago I visited the mother of an Austrian food-editor/chef friend who decided she want to make a hazelnut torte for us, apologizing the whole time because she wasn't a professional like us, as she ground the nuts and weighed the ingredients and I thought, she's probably a better pastry chef than half those working back home. My second thought is that there is no difference in difficulty of getting to 333 and 335 or 350 when you are using a (digital) scale in the way I just described. You add stuff and the numbers change so you can stop any time. Of course scales are calibrated differently (I way less at home than at my doctor's office). As in most things in the kitchen, one or five grams one way or the other doesn't matter, for sure. But using metric weights everyone will get closer to the same result (until you factor in temperature, which is a whole other story in bread baking). But if you are using teaspoons and cups and even ounces, which are in not very useful for scaling because they have no standard metric relationship to any other measurements in the system, everything is an approximation. And scaling calculations produce absurd results, such as 1.4 ounces or 7/8 of a cup. Anyway, that's how I, and probably others, get to those numbers which may seem obsessively accurate or exact, but really are just simple math that works when working in metric.
OMG! That looks and smells out of this world! When are you going to make it for me? Great article, as always.
Mitchell, your pizza looks glorious and I'm ready to head to the kitchen and get started. But here's a question I have, not just for you but very frequently with US ingredients listed in metric: Why the very specific 333 grams of flour and 333 grams of water? What happens if I miss a beat and add 334 or even 335 grams of flour? Or am I aiming for equal metric quantities of flour and water and the 333 grams really doesn't matter so much? Could I go as high as 350 grams? This all sounds very silly but I'm honestly quite serious in asking it. You are not alone in your specificity, by any means. Call me: Puzzled in Maine
Hi Nancy. Interesting comment/question. Two thoughts come to mind. The first is that bakers use bakers' percentages for their recipes/ratios/formulas, which allow them to easily scale up or down accurately. These percentages are unique in that all ingredients in a bread formula are indicated as a percentage of the total flour in the recipe, rather than everything adding up to 100%. My pizza dough recipe, as most home sourdough recipes, is based on 1 kilogram of flour (1000g), which is enough for two nice sized loaves or five individual pizzas. (A kilo of flour is about as small as you can go to get proper fermentation; some bakers have told me 2,500 g produces better results.) When I made the pizza formula to 1000 g of flour, the crust was too thick in my pan by a third, so I wanted to cut the formula to 2/3, hence the calculation of 667 g total flour in the end, and everything scaled to that. I will say that even though I grew up in Canada in an American family, making me equally comfortable in metric and imperial units (ambimetric?), it wasn't until I started baking bread a few years ago that I started using metric weights for baking recipes (not just bread, but also cakes and cookies) and it changed my life. It is so easy to scale up or scale down using ratios for different pan sizes, yields, etc. Plus no measuring utensils to clean—you just add everything to a bowl and tare the scale between additions. I can't believe everyone doesn't bake like this. More than 30 years ago I visited the mother of an Austrian food-editor/chef friend who decided she want to make a hazelnut torte for us, apologizing the whole time because she wasn't a professional like us, as she ground the nuts and weighed the ingredients and I thought, she's probably a better pastry chef than half those working back home. My second thought is that there is no difference in difficulty of getting to 333 and 335 or 350 when you are using a (digital) scale in the way I just described. You add stuff and the numbers change so you can stop any time. Of course scales are calibrated differently (I way less at home than at my doctor's office). As in most things in the kitchen, one or five grams one way or the other doesn't matter, for sure. But using metric weights everyone will get closer to the same result (until you factor in temperature, which is a whole other story in bread baking). But if you are using teaspoons and cups and even ounces, which are in not very useful for scaling because they have no standard metric relationship to any other measurements in the system, everything is an approximation. And scaling calculations produce absurd results, such as 1.4 ounces or 7/8 of a cup. Anyway, that's how I, and probably others, get to those numbers which may seem obsessively accurate or exact, but really are just simple math that works when working in metric.
Great and thorough comment, and thank you, Mitchell! But why is it that we all weigh less at home than we do in the doctor's office?