Registering slices of bread when you make your own sourdough

Jacq_qui

I don't trust MFP's guess of calories for this, it's based on someone else's recipe so isn't going to be accurate for me. Does anyone have experience of this? I tried to enter my own recipe - unsure how to log the sourdough starter ? It also wanted to know how many portions my recipe makes - well, that depends on how we cut it, which isn't the same every time. (We have small kids who get small slices, a husband who eats nearly twice as much as me, and me who is sometimes hungry and other times not so much.) Need to be able to do it by weight. Anyone successfully done this? thanks.

Mithridites

I have successfully done this with the recipe builder using 100% hydration sourdough starter. All you need is a kitchen scale, that you already probably have since you bake. My recipe called for 159 g of 100% hydration starter, so I logged 75 g rye flour and 75 ml water. I added all the other ingredients to the recipe builder in grams. After baking and cooling I weighed my bread. It was 1,850g for the loaf. In the recipe builder I made it 1,850 servings. When I cut a slice I weigh it and enter the number of grams as the number of servings. Hope that helps Now I feel like baking

Jacq_qui

Ah that's great. Thank you so much. Absolutely did not think of putting in the number of servings as number of grams

It will be interesting to see how many calories I've actually been eating versus what I have been logging! I bet I've been eating an awful lot more than I think

hlr1987

Most starters are kept fed at 50/50 water to flour. So if you record the whole loaf as a meal or recipe, add the flour by scanning the bag and recording the weight in grams of the flour your using plus half of the weight of the starter. Log it as one portion. You don't need to add the water to your recipe, but you could record the salt. When you've baked it, work out how much of the loaf you're eating- if you want to be really exact then weigh it again baked compared to the weight of a slice you cut to get a percentage of "one" portion that you added in the recipe.
But to be completely honest I normally estimate the percentage of the loaf I'm eating based on it being a 500g loaf recipe and assume it's averaged out as I eat the whole loaf over the week because I use a round proving basket and the slices are all different.

hlr1987

Mithridites wrote: »

After baking and cooling I weighed my bread. It was 1,850g for the loaf. In the recipe builder I made it 1,850 servings. When I cut a slice I weigh it and enter the number of grams as the number of servings. Hope that helps Now I feel like baking

That's a great tip about the total weight actually, easier than my guess work!

Jacq_qui

hlr1987 wrote: »

, add the flour by scanning the bag and recording the weight in grams of the flour

Thanks, good tip.

Maxxitt

+1 for recipe builder. I've been living on various homemade sourdough breads since the fall. I weigh all the ingredients every time I bake, and have found that there is little variation across loaves so I rely on one "built" recipe for each kind of sourdough. I make the "serving" as 100g and round down so that, for example, an 1250 loaf has 12 servings. I weigh what I eat, knowing that this also is not "accurate" because the bread dries a bit over the 5-6 days it lasts. The loaves [whole grain, sprouted grain mostly) are nutritious, delicious, and calorific and so I've had to make some adjustments in the rest of the day's intake not to over-eat a few hundred calories a day. But it's totally worth it ... I've had one loaf of store-bought bread in 9 months - the expensive "good" kind - and it paled in comparison.

Jacq_qui

I haven't bought shop bread in about two years, but the last time I did, I couldn't believe how little it tastes of anything - also can no longer understand all the ingredients on the back of the packet. What are all those things and why so many?

Anyway - update on this weeks bread, my husband cut up and made toast this morning before I could weigh it, so have another week of guessing. Can anyone here say how many calories they get in a loaf with the weight?

Mithridites

Mithridites wrote: »

I have successfully done this with the recipe builder using 100% hydration sourdough starter. All you need is a kitchen scale, that you already probably have since you bake. My recipe called for 159g of 100% hydration starter, so I logged 75 g rye flour and 75 ml water. I added all the other ingredients to the recipe builder in grams. After baking and cooling I weighed my bread. It was 1,850g for the loaf. In the recipe builder I made it 1,850 servings. When I cut a slice I weigh it and enter the number of grams as the number of servings. Hope that helps Now I feel like baking

The bolded was a typo. I meant 150g.

mjbnj0001

We had a conversation over in the "Recipes" section, under the "What Was the Last Thing You Cooked" thread about the topic of home-baked-bread nutrients and weight of hand-made bread slices a few weeks ago.

I did an experiment, since proper food scientists remove water from the items being analyzed, that I'd remove water from my homemade bread. How? I used the toaster to dry it out. Big change in weight.

I have always just included the nutritive components of my bread recipes (actually all recipes) in my MFP calculations, not the water, except labelled items that gave me macro values to use. So, when I measure my bread recipes, it's "ingredients in," "average slice servings out" - that is, my usual slices are 8-10mm, and a loaf is usually 22 servings as a result. Sometimes I slice thick, and log "1.5" slices" etc. Not rocket-science exact, but if you do the math, not too inaccurate in the grand scheme of things. As long as my bathroom scale keeps me honest about progress, I'm happy. I'm in basically the same camp as @Maxxitt above.

Since I've not been consistent in doing sourdough starter (I have plenty of packaged yeast on hand), my advice is diluted a bit (pun on sourdough starter, lol) - but if you're putting in x amount of flour over the week, and take out half the apparent volume, you probably have a decent near-approximation of the nutritive flour component from the starter for your recipe.

I use my own standard "template" recipes in MFP for each variety of bread I make, and strive to keep the composition of the resulting loaves consistent, except of course, I am aware that water content is probably the biggest variable. I once heard an old baker's saying that I remember each time: "each loaf is a unique act of creation."