i bake bread pretty much every day, often twice.
whilst i can agree with you that a recipe is a guide not the law i must stress to you the point i made about the type of bread or loaf you are trying to bake requiring different water ratios.
there's a world of difference between the average homemade loaf and properly accomplished breadmaking.
it's like any craft, there's the way a lot of folk do it then there's the way it's done expertly. technique, quantities etc.
a lot of people think a loaf of bread is just a loaf of bread.
i used to be a professional chef, now i do it for joy not money.
i learned my breadmaking from richard bertinet.
if you don't believe what i say about breadmaking then you sure as fluff should believe him. the man knows more about bread and breadmaking than most people know about any one thing.
maybe i'm a bit obsessed with bread?
probably.
anyway all this came from me pointing out the fact that weighing water is a more accurate form of measurement than a measuring jug.
( blaireau69 , the Cumbrian Travis Bickle., Thu 3 Jun 2010, 12:00, 2 replies, latest was 14 years ago)

Well....
....I bake bread 14 times a day at least. And my bread is used as the Standard Bread stored at the Ministry Of Standards so they have a bread to compare against when measuring things like crunchy or bounciness or weevil content.

I personally only ever use fresh rain to moisten my bread dough, and I work out the measurement by leaving my dough outside in a forest on a platter of my hair and I pray to the God of Bread to bless my dough and he spills his watery yeasty seed upon it in exactly the right quantities to achieve the perfect breaddiness.

I then fuck it and slap nutella on it for my tea.
(NoveltyCondomHead Clanks Wams., Thu 3 Jun 2010, 13:24, Reply)

that's quite funny actually!
extra points for effort.
i like the bit about the hair-platter.
yeah, i get quite excited about bread. i guess i maybe take it too seriously.
( blaireau69 , the Cumbrian Travis Bickle., Thu 3 Jun 2010, 13:42, Reply)

Well I wasn't trying to be mean...
....just seemed that some oneupmanship was going on and I wanted to play. My entire experience of bread making as been throwing a pile of stuff in a bread maker and marvelling at the inedibility of the wheat based brick that resulted many hours later.

Oh and my girlfriend once shallow fried a chocolate brownie (by substituting all the other liquids for more oil).
(NoveltyCondomHead Clanks Wams., Thu 3 Jun 2010, 13:49, Reply)

yeah, i can see how would be interpreted that way!
you made me laugh, at your teasing and at myself too!
the simple fact is that i do bake a lot of bread and i was only trying to point out the way we can all accidentally use poor technique in the things we do.
and now i hate myself for being a technique nazi.
;-)
( blaireau69 , the Cumbrian Travis Bickle., Thu 3 Jun 2010, 13:54, Reply)

Well I only bake about once a week
and then usually with onions or tomatoes or olives or something else in, so not just standard loaves. And I note that at my local bakery they also just slosh water into their enormous bread making machine with gay abandon, and not a single set of digitial scales in site.
(Smale is stuffed, Thu 3 Jun 2010, 15:03, Reply)

i doubt they're only baking on or two loaves at a time therefore any error in measuring will be reduced %wise.
i also doubt that they don't measure their water.

if making a batch of dough for say 10 loaves, using 5kg of flour, that would call for 3.5l of water for a regular dough.
applying the same maths as i used above the error would equate to 500ml of water too much.
if using a container of a known volume, even if not a "measuring jug" just a vessel you have previously calibrated with eg a 1l bottle, even if you are out by a relatively large volume you would struggle to be out by a whole half litre.

perhaps my original post was a little ambiguous. perhaps i should have made it clear that i was referring to domestic rather than commercial baking. although to be fair to myself i did specify 350ml/350g which is obviously not large scale.

you hit it right on the head mind you when you refer to how they "just slosh water into their enormous bread making machine". hardly the kind of craft baking i do myself.
also i should point out that i hardly ever bake "just standard loaves" myself. the dough is a starting point. i could list a dozen or more loaves that use a strong white dough as a starter, without touching on sourdough or rye or wholemeal or whatever.
( blaireau69 , the Cumbrian Travis Bickle., Thu 3 Jun 2010, 15:26, Reply)