Lesson: It’s the Salt, Stupid
When is 1 tsp. not one teaspoon? When it’s salt.
I’ve quickly become a convert in using weights (and metric weights in particular!) for measuring ingredients. This was reinforced in my first week when I learned that one cup of flour could have a weight variance of 25 to 50%, radically changing the outcome of the recipe.
My digital kitchen scale is accurate to .1 oz, or about 3 grams. This is fine for large volumes like flour, but useless for small measurements like salt and yeast, so I’ve stuck with the teaspoon measurements that my recipes have also included. In Peter Reinhart’s book he gives salt and yeast measurements in both teaspoons and grams. He also gives two measurements for salt, depending on whether you’re using regular table salt or coarse Kosher salt. Coarse salt has bigger gains, so the same amount (weight) of salt takes up a larger volume (teaspoons) – Reinhart ups the salt measurement for coarse salt by about 50%.
1 tsp is not 1 tsp
In my SFBI class I learned that the amount of salt you use is critical to the flavor and fermentation of your bread. The right amount of salt is almost always 2% of the total amount of flour – less than 1.8% and you have no flavor, more than 2.2% and it’s too salty. A 1000g piece of dough (about two loaves) will have between 500 and 600g of flour. The right amount of salt with 500g of flour would be 10g plus or minus 1g – that’s not a lot of latitude to get it right!
When staring at a teaspoon of coarse Kosher salt while making Loaf 27, I realized I didn’t really know what it weighed. I measured 10 teaspoons of salt into a bowl on my scale and it read 30g, so a teaspoon is about 3g. So for my 1000g of dough, I have to be within 1/3 of a teaspoon to hit the right amount of salt.
Knowing that, I went back to look at my flavorless Loaf 16. The teaspoon measurement in Reinhart’s recipe is low by 25% for my particular brand of coarse Kosher salt – no wonder I had no flavor! From now on I’m going to make sure I know what my salt and yeast weigh per teaspoon so I can get those ingredients right.
Lessons
- Know what your salt weighs per teaspoon!
Edit – 3/12/12: I did a more scientific measurement today to get a more accurate value for a tsp of kosher salt, and to compare it to a tsp of standard Morton’s table salt. I measured out 50 tsps of each and weighed them. My scale is accurate to about 3 grams, so this got me within one or two percent.
1 tsp Morton’s table salt = 6.5g
1 tsp Kosher coarse salt = 3.4g
1 tsp Morton’s = 1.9 tsp Kosher
1 tsp Kosher = .53 tsp Morton’s
I need to almost double the amount of salt in most of my recipes.