Friday 29th August 2014

Hello my friends, hope you are all well and busy. This is one of my quick and slightly amateurish posts to point you to the BreadStorm site where you can play with a couple of dough formulae if you have a spare moment and explore what it can do.

I had hoped that WordPress would let me embed this interactive version of the kefir levain on the blog direct but it looks as if I have to upload it to BreadStorm’s site, which I have done and if you use the links below they will take you to their site and you can see how the magic of their BreadStorm scaling works. 

So no longer is one stuck with pen and pencil or calculator and rusty maths trying to figure out how to make a recipe smaller to make only one loaf, or bigger to feed a house full of guests, or even deal with the sometimes baffling mysteries of bakers percentages, this is an easy way round it.

Now I dare say if you are a wizard with spreadsheets and formulae you can do this all for yourself and I have tried a few spreadsheets over the years that other people have made, but for people like me, with mid-range maths and a habit of making errors who are baffled for the most part by spreadsheets, (ok I admit it, I loathe spreadsheets)  this is a gift.

You can do it on the site the links take you to and print it off or write the numbers down once you have used the nifty scaling boxes to suit yourself. I have the  BreadStorm reader app which is free on my iPhone and on my Ipad. You can find these on the App Store. You can download the free readers and download the formula and other formulae that have been published on the web. There are details on the BreadStorm site.  I have the fully fledged paid for version on my desktop and that means I can write and edit my own formulae and read and scale them. The free BreadStorm reader versions don’t give you the ability to write and edit formula but they are perfect for scaling up and down. Here is the Date Kefir Rimacinata formula  in a bun file for you to play with :-

I used it yesterday as I was baking to scale up my formula to make 2.5kgs of dough. It’s a versatile and useful addition to my small baking life, and now I have got the hang of it I suspect I will use it more and more.

… and if all that is just too much and a bit too geeky, here is one of Brian’s photos of tamarisk planted along the seafront at Burnham. You can see the wooden lighthouse on stilts in the distance. We walked out and the rain sailed behind us and inland and it warmed up nicely and we had a lovely ball chasing time with the dogs. As you can see it is in full crazy pink bloom right now!

Apparently it is used as a windbreak plant. It was crawling with bees of all shapes and sizes and scented the air with honey.  I recommend a walk on the beach to clear your head and put life in perspective, but to each their own. Have a lovely weekend all!

Disclosure -( I believe this is what one should write yes?)

(I am not paid by BreadStorm in any shape or form. I beta-tested their iPad app for a couple of months this summer for fun, and I have the paid for version on my desktop, paid for by me and they have not asked me to write anything about their software or promote it. I do this for love of bread and because I like their apps.)

 

NB … Just thought I would add a bit, (told you this was an amateurish post!). …. To see the scaling working on other people’s sites, which are either self-hosted or allow embedding of .bun files unlike this one :  Try visiting MC Farine or Karin’s Brot & Bread for lots of good information and examples of how it works for them.  MC has written extensively about how she uses BreadStorm software and a delightful post about the bakers behind the project  Dado and Jacqueline Colussi in her Meet the Bakers series.