One of the books that I have opened the most in the past ten years is Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread. It is a tome of a thing - a text-book for bread bakers. There are many things I’ve learned from the book but the most powerful idea has been Baker’s Percentages.

Baker’s Percentages are a tool for reading and writing bread recipes (formulas!). You express all the ingredients in terms of their weight relative to the total weight of the flour in the recipe.

This makes it very easy to scale recipes for bigger or smaller yields. This is especially useful when you start baking more complex breads involving multiple different stages with sourdough starters, pre-ferments like poolishes, bigas and sponges and soakers of seeds and grains. It also gives you a good intuition about how a particular recipe will behave.

After a few years of scribbled calculations on scraps of paper and tangled spreadsheets for bread formulas, I hacked together a little web application to make this easier. I also used this as an excuse to try out Typescript and React.

Crusty is what resulted and despite it’s hacked-together-ness, it has turned out to be one of my most-used pieces of software in the past few years.

A screenshot of crusty in action. Not much to look at but it tastes delicious

Some of its outputs:

Challah and buns made from the same dough. Tartine-style sourdough and 80% Rye A batch of plaited rolls Bun and flour pareidolia Some more plaited rolls
Sourdough with sunglasses. A feast of bagels and wheat sourdough loaves Sourdough bread resting beside a rasberry pi 400 A 3x4 grid of soft butter rolls to be baked.