4 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:The NY Times recipe calls for 3 cups all purpose flour and 1 5/8 cups of water.
The KAF ingredient weight chart says a cup of all purpose flour is 120g. Three cups would be 360g. For the water, 1 5/8 cup, according to the Windows calculator, is 384.4559 ml, or approximately 384g. To calculate percent hydration divide the water weight by the flour weight times 100: 384/360 x 100 = 107% hydration.
I don't see any weight conversions on Bittman's recipe. However if he gets 345g water out of 1 5/8 cup I would seriously suspect his scale. (But this from the woman who just added half the proper amount of sugar to her batch of cookies, so take it with a grain of salt.)
In the original NYTimes article, they did indeed use volumetric measurements. The Bittman weights came from a later article,which was quoted about 2 years ago in the comments (notes) on the original article that we're discussing. He may have tweaked the recipe by then. I was quoting his numbers as the basis for the 80% ratio.
My numbers came from my scale. My 3 cups of flour weighed 462g, according to my scale, which is closer to his 430g than to your calculated 360g. The 1-5/8 c water weighed 388g, which is a pretty close agreement with your calculated 384.4, especially considering the markings on my beaker. There could easily be a 4ml error.
Does the KA Flour calculator assume sifted flour? I didn't sift mine. Bittman was silent on the topic in the original article. I suspect his was also unsifted.
