zlacker

Yeah, he didn't explain that part well. Bakers typically have ingredients in terms of ratios with respect (usually) to the mass of the main flour. There could be up to a dozen ingredients (sometimes just 3) with time and temperature sensitive processes. A typical small artisinal bakery will have a repertoire of a couple dozen baked goods. It's a fair amount of stuff to keep track of especially when you throw planning/scheduling into the mix.

One doesn't need anything more than a notebook (a paper notebook that is) to do this stuff, but to each his own.

>>crispy+(OP)
Yeah. Lots of hand waving in the piece because it was a choice between something I could write in a morning for a general audience or, frankly, not bothering to write anything at all.

A bakery formula is an acyclic directed graph running from top level “product” nodes (a loaf of bread, say) through one or more intermediate formulae until you reach basic ingredients. For a given set of orders, you need to work out how much of which ingredient to mix at each step in the process. If I were only working in, say six loaf batches, it’d probably be easier to use a ready reckoner approach, but it’s a tiny bakery and I’d rather not deal with the wastage so I only bake what’s ordered.

After about the third time I fucked up the pencil and paper calculations, I decided to automate (then at least the bad calculations were repeatable, and only needed fixing once).

>>pdcawl+LJ
> A bakery formula is an acyclic directed graph

I'm so glad to see other people think of recipes this way. I have so much trouble keeping track of what's going on in a complicated recipe because of the linear way it's written. I have good results rewriting them as a DAG on an index card (or the back of the recipe card) and just following that instead of the recipe.