Bakers percentage for cookies

Bakers percentage for cookies - Person Putting Christmas Tree Shaped Cookies on a Tray

I am aware of the bakers percentage used in bread, and I have used it successfully.

I am baking cookies at home as a hobby. I have collected few recipes from blogs, and they work great.

As I am now aware of the ingredients used for cookies, is there any bakers percentage which we need to keep in mind?



Best Answer

Not in the same sense as in bread, no.

First, in bread, there is one main ratio: liquid to flour. You can conveniently express any "additions" such as fat etc. as a percentage of the flour too, but they are additions, as in principle, you can make bread with water+flour only. The effects of these ingredients exhibit much less interaction than cookie ingredients, so you can look at each percentage separately and immediately gain some information about the bread.

In cookies, there are several problems. First, "cookie" is a much broader category. A shortbread cookie, a snickerdoodle, a lace cookie and a macaroon have basically nothing in common, structurewise. They need totally different ingredients to achieve totally different textures, and any ratio of ingredients makes sense within this type of cookie, but not across all cookies. In bread, you have a few exceptions (think knäckebröd), but mostly it is all variation of the same stuff.

Second, in cookies, ingredients interaction is more important. They are not made up of flour and water with a few ingredients to tweak the texture, they are made up of eggs, flour, sugar, fat, nuts, and a mixture of whipped egg whites, sugar and nut flour, glued with e.g. whipped ganache (for macarons) behaves in a totally different way from a mixture of stirred eggs, sugar and flour, baked and sprinkled with nut pieces over a chocolate glaze (spritzgebäck). You cannot turn one into the other by slightly tweaking the amount of an ingredient. You cannot say that there is an interval of "between x and y percent of ingredient i" in which a cookie turns out well.

If you concentrate on one specific cookie, it becomes much more manageable. There are ratio intervals there, and within that interval the cookie will work and outside of it probably not. But they are not all ratios of one ingredient to flour, because of the interactions. You need to express the ratio of all ingredients at once. It is still doable, and useful, if you can find a good resource describing it. But here comes the next problem: I don't know of a resource which does this. Macarons may be the exception, as they have so tight tolerances, so you can probably look at 2-3 recipes and will already know the limit of the acceptable ratios. But in cookies with more leeway, I suspect it is only literature aimed at industrial food technologists or even private knowledge in industrial manufacturers who have studied and written down that kind of information.




Pictures about "Bakers percentage for cookies"

Bakers percentage for cookies - Person Flattening a Chocolate Dough With Rolling Pin
Bakers percentage for cookies - Person Holding a Tray With Different Shapes of Brown Cookies
Bakers percentage for cookies - Person Using a Cookie Cutter



How do you calculate bakers percentage?

Ingredient Percentage=Ingredient Weight/Total Flour x 100% For example, if a formula calls for 60 pounds of water and 100 pounds of flour, the baker's percent would be 60% water.

What percentage of a cookie is flour?

The flour in the formula is always 100%. You will usually use this method for cakes, cookies, and breads....Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe.Sugar, 75 grams37.5%Salt, 3 grams1.5%Eggs, 50 grams25%Flour, 200 grams100% (in Baker's Percentage, we know that flour is 100%)Baking Soda, 3 grams1.5%4 more rows•Jan 1, 2022

What is always 100% in a bakers percentage?

In using baker's percentage, each ingredient in a formula is expressed as a percentage of the flour weight, and the flour weight is always expressed as 100%.

Why do bakers use bakers percentage?

It's based on the total weight of flour a formula contains. Instead of dividing each ingredient's weight by the total formula weight, bakers divide each ingredient by the weight of flour. Baker's percent is useful for quickly assessing if a formula is drier, saltier, sweeter, etc.



Breaking Down Baker's Percentages | Baker's math, dough hydration, baking formulas




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