General Flour Using Notes

Since the start of self-quarantine, I've been having a lot of spare time after work. I started off cooking with flour, such as baking my own buns, toasts, pizzas, pancakes, and cakes.
At the very beginning, it was a nightmare to use a presice amount of all ingredients. I would even bring a notebook like an lab record. Eventually, after a lot of success as well as failure, I think I've got a golden ratios for how much amount of each ingredients to use. And I'd like to put them as a note here, also for sharing.
Note that I prefer using "gram", "milliliter" as the basic measure of mass and volume since I'm from China where nobody use anything else:) And here I would only share a ratio of ingredients, instead of all steps to the end.

Baking a dry bread

This section is for all kinds of dry bread, such as buns and toasts. The difference between them is just how you shape the dough before the final fermentation.

• Exact values of amount for three serves

Flour  -  360g
Egg    -  1 (around 50g)
Milk   -  180g
Salt   -  3g
Yeast  -  3g
Sugar  -  30g
Butter -  30g

For male adult as me, the most balanced amount of flour to use for one serve is around 100-120g. I usually bake for three breakfasts thus I listed for three serves.
Here comes the point, if you want to adjust the amount of flour, for example, first try for one serve, want a smaller serve, or even bake for a group of five people, you'd definitely want a correct ratio. And this is really annoying when you want to try a small serve but it seems like you have to divide a single egg.

• Dry - liquid mass ratio

flour  -  liquid
  3    -    2

Let's first ignore the mass of salt, yeast, sugar and butter, because what you have to do is to use the ratio at first, such as 120g flour - 10g sugar.
You will want to pay attention to the liquid. Things like egg, milk, water, honey will all be taken account here. So when you want to try out for only one serve but do not want to divide a whole egg, you do the following:

Flour -  120g
egg   -  1 (around 50g)
milk  -  30g

I know that the ratio between egg and milk changes a lot, and yes, the taste changes. But if you add more milk, your dough will be too wet that it drives you mad.
For another example, when you want to try a lot of honey as a replacement of sugar, and bake two smaller serves, and you still don't want to divide an agg:

Flour - 180g
egg   - 1 (around 50g)
honey - 30g
milk  - 40g

See what's happening? It is basically to

1. Decide how many serves to make, and this gives you how much total flour you will use.
2. Then you know the total amount of liquid, which is 2/3 of the mass of flour.
3. Substitue the mass of eggs and any special liquid from the total amount liquid, and this is how much milk or water you use.

Baking or frying from wet batter

This will require a bowl of batter that has some degree of fluidity but not too sticky.
A one-serve recipe for me is:

Flour - 120g
egg   - 1 (around 50g)
milk  - 70g
sugar - 10g
salt  - 1/8 tsp
baking powder - 1 tsp

The amount of sugar, salt, and baking power come in the same way, just multiply by the same scalar as that for flour. And for the liquid - egg and milk, or potentially, honey, - my golden ratio is:

Flour - liquid
  1   -   1

The calculation is exactly the same as how you do to bake a bun: get total amount of liquid, substitude what you cannot change and what is special, and add milk or water.

Finally, these two ratio is not for baking a cake or souffle pancake, which requires whipping the egg white. The property of whipped egg white is totally changed, and you have to mix the flour with the yolk batter before you mix the whipped egg white with the others. Be sure to refer to a famous YouTuber before complain to me :)

Jun. 27th, 2020