I’ll update this list and repost periodically as I mention more baking terms in my posts, but let’s start with some basics for now:
Baker’s Percentage: The proportions of ingredients in bread dough. The flour is always 100%, and all the other ingredients are measured in proportion to that.
Feed/Refresh a starter: The act of adding fresh water and flour to a portion of ripe starter in order to perpetuate the colony of yeast and bacteria present in the starter. FYI: I use these terms interchangeably.
Heel: The very ends of the loaf that are leftover after you have sliced and eaten the rest of the loaf; very high crust-to-crumb ratio.
Hydration: The percentage of liquid ingredients in a bread dough, in proportion to the flour. For example: a dough hydrated at 65% has 65g of water to every 100g of flour. A recipe that calls for 10 kilos of flour will require 6.5 kilos of water.
Oven Spring: The expansion of a loaf of bread while baking.
Refresh/Feed a starter: The act of adding fresh water and flour to a portion of ripe starter in order to perpetuate the colony of yeast and bacteria present in the starter. FYI: I use these terms interchangeably.
Ripe/Ripen/Ripening: A term I use for a starter that is “ready/becoming ready” to use. When it’s ready to use, it is “ripe.” If it’s not ready, it is still “ripening;” let it continue to “ripen” before you use it.
Starter: Also called a Chef, Levain, Mother, Sourdough, it refers to the flour/water mixture of dough that bakers incorporate into their bread dough for leavening and flavor. I prefer the term starter rather than something more personified, because conversations can get hilariously confusing. (See: the time my friend told me her “mother” died via message chat. Lord…)
Liquid starters are hydrated at 100%, or more.
Stiff starters are hydrated between 50-75%.
Sourdough: I like to think of sourdough as the ultimate Symbiotic Symphony. Sourdough is a mixture of flour and water that sustains a culture of naturally occurring yeast and lactic acid bacteria. The sourdough culture is maintained by daily refreshings or “feedings” of more flour and water in the same ratio already present in the sourdough culture. When the culture is mixed into a dough, the naturally occurring yeast is responsible for releasing gases that leaven the dough, and the lactic acid bacteria flavors the dough. When the culture is in the process of propagating, the lactic acid bacteria metabolizes the sugars introduced from the flour in the most recent feeding, while the yeast metabolizes the byproducts of the lactic acid fermentation.