.What is Desired Dough Temperature (DDT)?
Often overlooked by restaurants and bakeries, desired dough temperature is your key to achieving consistently perfect sourdough. It is one of the most important fundamental skills a baker can learn.
Using proper dough temperatures can instantly improve your baking by giving consistency to your doughs fermentation, flavour and schedules. If your dough is 30°C/85°F one day and 22°C/72°F the next day you can't expect to have consistent results and good sourdough fermentation.
In sourdough (and other Artisan Bread) baking we have only a few ingredients and a few factors that will affect our doughs temperature.
- Room temperature.
- Flour temperature.
- The friction factor (see below for description).
- Temperature of the sourdough preferment.
- Water temperature - The only real variable we can control from the above list is the water temperature. So to calculate our desired dough temperature water will equal X. We will take our other factors and use them to find our X factor/water temperature.
How to Use the Desired Dough Temperature Calculator
Enter your desired dough temperature. Next take the temperatures and fill in the remaining parameters. The required water temperature to acheive the desired dough temperature will calculate for you.
Temperatures can be entered in both Celcius and Farenheit.
What is Friction Factor?
Friction factor refers to the heat given to the dough during the mixing process. If you rub your hands together you will generate some heat, the same thing happens when mixing our dough. Depending on if we are mixing by hand or different styles, sizes and brands of machines they will all have different effects on the dough.
Friction factor can be very hard to assess and each baker/environment will be different. For example a low hydration dough will have a high friction factor.
To calculate your environment's friction factor you can work backwards after mixing your dough.
- Take the actual dough temp and x 4.
- Subract the room, flour and preferment temperature to get your friction factor.
A common starting point for the friction factor might be in the range of 5°C to 10°C (approximately 9°F to 18°F). This provides a reasonable baseline, but it's crucial to monitor the actual dough temperature after mixing and adjust the friction factor accordingly.
