How do you calculate baker's percentages for salt and starter?
Baker's math is always a percentage of the flour weight, so 2 percent salt is 20 g only when you have 1000 g of flour; for 500 g of flour it is 10 g. Same idea for the starter: 20 percent means 20 percent of the flour weight, and yes, that is ripe, peaked starter. A stiff starter fed at 1:5:2.5 or a regular one at 1:5:5 both work, as long as you use it near its peak just before it collapses.
Answered by Hendrik, The Bread Code
From the book
In a large bakery, a determining factor is how much flour you have at hand. Based on the amount of flour you have, you can calculate how many loaves or buns you can make. To make it easy for bakers, the quantity of each ingredient is calculated as a percentage based on how much flour you have. Let me demonstrate this with a small example from a pizzeria. In the morning you check and you realize you have around 1 kg of flour. Your default recipe calls for around 600 g of water. That would be a typical pizza dough, not too dry but also not too wet. Then you would be using around 20 g of salt and around 100 g of sourdough starter. 1 The next day you suddenly have 1.4 kg of flour at hand and thus can make more pizza dough. What do you do? Do you multiply all the ingredients by 1.4? Yes you could, but there is an easier way. This is where baker’s math comes in handy. Let’s look at the default recipe with baker’s math and then adjust it for the 1.4 kg flour quantity.
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