this post was submitted on 07 May 2026
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I wonder if all great cooks "feel it out" or if that's just something I tell myself to help my disorganized ass sleep at night.
Feeling it out is my favorite part about cooking.
I just never ever write down what I do, so I can never reproduce it lol
Cooking allows for a lot of "feeling it out". For example, most spices you aren't really going to taste a difference between a tsp and a tbsp of the same spice. Just knowing what spices go into the dish you are making can often be enough.
For example, taco seasoning is onions, cumin, oragano, chili pepper, and paprika. By far, the cumin and onions drive the flavor, you could almost leave out everything else. With that in mind, it mostly ends up being just the technique. Brown the onions, toast the spices, brown the meat. The actual amount of spices that goes in won't make a huge difference one way or another. What does make a difference is if you grind your cumin instead of using preground (that's true for most seed spices).
Technique is often the most important thing vs exact ingredient measuring. The exception to this is baking. You must measure (preferably by weight) your flour and liquids. You can eventually do it by feel, but it's hard. You'll get much better results with a scale. Even then, it's mostly just the process of targeting the right hydration. 70% does well for a lot of white breads (For every 1 gram of flour add 0.7g of liquid).
Wouldn't that be 41% hydration? You add 0.7g water to 1g flour, you get 1.7g of dough, 0.7g is about 41% of 1.7g
Nope. You aren't measuring the percentage of liquid in a dough. You are measuring the percentage of liquid relative to the mass of flour. That's why you can have 100% or higher hydration doughs.
In actual math, you are correct, but these are baker percentages where flour is always 100% and all other ingredients are relative to the flour.
So a recipe would look like this:
80% White Flour 20% Whole Grain 75% Water 15% Sour Dough Starter 2% Salt
Makes it really simple to scale recipes, you decide how much flour to use, for example 500g it becomes
400g White Flour 100g Whole Grain 375g Water 75g Sour Dough 10g Salt
Pro tip (really more of an amateur tip): Flour is a natural product that varies widely between different regions and there can be large differences in how much water they can hold and how much protein (gluten) it has. Hold back 10-15% of the water at first and only add it bit by bit when the dough feels dense and you think it (and you) can handle it. My biggest beginner mistakes were definetly trying high hydration doughs without the know how of how to handle such doughs and how to tell whether or not the flour could actually hold on to that much water. 65% Hydration can make also make a dope loaf that's much easier to handle
Oh that does actually make things much easier since the real percentage is much harder to track once you have several ingredients.
Thank you for the best and simplest explanation of doing __% hydration for dough that I've seen.
No problem. I've definitely seen a lot of baking articles that somehow try and make this simple concept unbelievably convoluted.
The only other thing to know is that 1 mL of water = 1 gram of water. Which means 170g of water == 170 mL of water (At STP... blah blah blah. It's not super important to hit exactly 70% you can hit 75% or 65% and you'll be fine. It's close enough to true).
Yeah, and even when you do taste a difference, it's rarely actually bad. Usually, it's just a different hint of something in the overall taste. If you make the dish often, those variations are actually good, because it makes it more interesting.