In the dough, but not of it

On working with inclusions and soakers

Walnut pain au levain

Inclusions are things added to breads that don’t “dissolve” into the dough during mixing—think raisins, nuts, chocolate chips, and so on. Soakers are inclusions that have been soaked (our cooked) in water—or another liquid—ahead of time, in order to hydrate them; it’s done most commonly with seeds or grains, especially those that are inedible when dry or raw. (It’s also sometimes used with dried fruits, to plump and soften them further.) Not only does this soften their texture, it prevents them from drawing moisture away from the dough during proofing, so that itdoes not end up under-hydrated.

I love breads with inclusions, since they give a bread another layer of texture, visual appeal, flavor, and nutrition. In the case of soakers, they also act as a moisture reserve, allowing the crumb to stay moist longer, since they slowly release water over time. But inclusions and soakers are super annoying to work with, at least when it comes to developing recipes, as I have realized recently.

Here’s why:

Imagine you have two otherwise identical breads—a sourdough boule, say—one with a simple inclusion—walnuts, say—and one without. The goal would be to make them look more or less identical after baking, with the same overall dimensions. Because the walnuts take up space within the loaf, you’d reduce the weight of the dough to account for them.

But in order to keep the loaf the same size, you’d probably want to reduce it by somewhat less than the weight of the walnuts, for two reasons. One, walnuts are far denser than the bread that surrounds them, so you’ll need more dough to bring the loaf to the same dimensions. And two, because they interrupt gluten structure, adding inclusions of any kind will tend to compact the crumb somewhat, so you’ll need more dough to account for that as well. So the walnut-containing loaf will weigh substantially more than one without them, if it is identical in size.

Rugbrød with a rye berry soaker and a mixed-seed inclusion.

This is all annoying enough, but it becomes all the more so when you swap out the nuts for a soaker—cooked rye berries, for example—for several reasons. To begin with, a soaked thing, saturated with moisture, is substantially more dense than any unsoaked inclusion, so you’ll need to up the surrounding dough weight even further to accommodate it in order to keep the loaf of a similar size. And each grain or seed takes up a different amount of water once saturated, so if you later on swap out one for another—and you craft your recipes around dough weights and baker’s percentages, as most bakers do—you’ll have to rejigger the recipe all over again to account for the variance in weight.

There’s also another layer of complication that comes from using a soaker: the water it contains and its influence on the dough formula on paper. We bakers usually consider recipes in terms of hydration, or the ratio of water to flour, by weight. The hydration of a dough has a direct relationship to the texture of the dough: more water makes for a softer, looser dough compared to one with less (assuming the flour is identical in both), and vice versa.

But the water in a soaker is locked up on its insides, and has no influence on the texture of the dough; it does not “hydrate” the dough, and yet it is normally included in the overall formula as part of the total water (and thus its hydration). While this makes sense, math-wise, since bakers aim to keep tabs on all of the things that go into a loaf, and their relative ratios to one another, it is illogical in practice, and makes crafting recipes (especially crafting new ones from known ones) a serious headache.

And therein lies the problem with inclusions and soakers: they take up space within a dough, but their weight (and hydration, in the case of the latter) is in many ways beside the point. They are in the dough, but not of it. Bakers for good reason prefer to do everything using ratios pegged to weight, but inclusions and soakers are almost better considered in terms of volume¹: How much room do they take up within the dough (and how much do they compromise the volume of the loaf)?

This is now how I approach them, and while writing inclusion-based recipes remains annoying, the shift in thinking has made crafting new ones a little easier. I still need to sort out the baker’s ratios of all of the ingredients in a formula at the end of the day, but during testing I keep the inclusions and the dough entirely separate and feel my way to a final formula through experimentation.

Here are some of the tactics I employ:

• If I don’t mind my loaves being of different sizes, the simplest approach is to just add the inclusion or soaker to the same amount of dough and roll with it. I’ll end up with two loaves of different size and weight, but it requires no thought or calculation. The loaf will be slightly more compact and closer-crumbed thanks to the inclusion, but the added volume it brings will make up for some of the difference. If I are working with large batches of dough and dividing before shaping, I’ll of course need to account for the added weight of the inclusion when it comes time to shape.

• There is a limit to this approach, especially when the loaf is baked in a pan: If, for example, I was to add 50% raisins by weight, relative to flour, to a dough already perfectly scaled for a particular pan, the new loaf is likely to mushroom out of the pan once baked. And even a freeform hearth loaf is likely to get absurdly large if you were to add an excess of inclusions to it without adjusting the dough weight. So I aim to be conservative about exactly how much of a particular inclusion a loaf can accommodate, at least at first.

• Most of the time, however, I am trying to create loaves of a similar shape and size, with or without an inclusion, and regardless of the inclusion in question. So I’ll start with a known dough formula, and add the inclusion to it, reducing the “surrounding” dough weight by 30-50% of the dry weight of the inclusion, a range I have found effective through experimentation. (By dry weight, I mean not including any water it contains if it is a soaker, since, remember, it does not change the volume of the inclusion within the dough.)

• I’ll then make the recipe and see what I get. If the loaf has either too little or too much of the inclusion, I’ll adjust the amount of it, and make up for the change by also altering the amount of dough accordingly.

• Once the relative amount of inclusion in the loaf is where I want it, I’ll write up a formula, but will not include any water contained within the inclusion in the ratios; that way I can fiddle with the makeup of the inclusion—to make variations, for example—while keeping the “true” hydration of the dough consistent.

• At this point, if the loaf is smaller or larger than it should be, I’ll scale the amounts of dough and inclusion up or down in parallel until it is just right. (Since “writing up” a formula for me means entering it onto my formula-calculating spreadsheet, all I have to do here is adjust the dough weight, and the amounts of everything in it will shift accordingly.)

• In my own spreadsheet formulas, I now never include the soaker water as an ingredient in the table. That way the hydration of the dough is obvious and won’t change if I swap out the soaker with another. I’ll keep notes on how much water the soaker takes up (since it will determine the dough weight at dividing time and the weight of the loaves), but it won’t go into the “official” formula. (I have yet to decide how to approach this when writing recipes for the book or elsewhere; I’ll probably include “soaker water” as a separate ingredient, so the hydration of the dough is easy to spot.)

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a cooked-rye berry soaker, ready to add to a dough

I have a few other bits of practical advice to share for working with inclusions and soakers generally:

• This one I have learned through experience: Be conservative with the hydration of the dough at first, to avoid overshooting the mark, since some soakers do carry water into the dough itself. You should always strive to drain your soaker as much as possible before adding it to a dough, but some ingredients hold onto moisture—on their exteriors, not just their insides—more tenaciously than others. (Small seeds are challenging to drain fully, especially those that release starch or other sticky compounds upon soaking. Flax seeds are annoyingly goopy, for example.)

• To be safe, hold back some of the water from a formula during mixing—say 5% or so—until the soaker has been fully incorporated, adding the remainder slowly until the texture of the dough is similar to one without the soaker present. If the dough doesn’t need all of the extra water, you can weigh what is left over and adjust the final formula appropriately.

• Secondly, remember to adjust the salt percentage in the formula so that the inclusions are seasoned similarly to the dough. Normally, the weight of salt in a dough is based upon the weight of flour (usually in the range of 1.5 to 2%, relative to flour). But if you add a substantial amount of inclusions to a dough, the amount of salt relative to everything in the dough will be lower than the ideal, and the bread will be under-seasoned. So you’ll need to increase the salt percentage to account for it.

• You don’t want to increase the salt to cover all of the inclusion, because the salt won’t get taken up into it, and the surrounding dough will end up overly salty. What I usually do is split the difference: 1.5%–2% salt relative to flour, plus half as much, relative to the dry weight of the inclusion(s). For example, if the formula contains 400g flour and 100g sunflower seeds, and the dough normally contains 1.8% salt:

  • 400g x 1.8% = 7.2g

  • 100g x 0.9% = 0.9g

  • 7.2 + 0.9 = 8.1g, which amounts to 2.0%, relative to 400g flour.

• Keep in mind this only applies to things that benefit from seasoning, like nuts, seeds, and grains. I wouldn’t add extra salt to a formula containing dried fruit or chocolate chips, for example.

• And when the inclusion is already salty (olives or salty cheeses, for example), you’ll likely want to decrease the salt percentage. Reducing it by half of the dry weight of the inclusion is again a good starting point. So if the inclusion above was black olives:

  • 400g x 1.8% = 7.2g

  • 100g x 0.9% = 0.9g

  • 7.2 - 0.9 = 6.3g, or 1.58%, relative to flour.

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That’s everything I have to say right now about working with soakers and inclusions. Is any of this interesting to anyone else but me? Is there any aspect of it that remains confusing or needs more explanation? Does anyone have a different approach to all this that they’d like to share? Hit me up in the comments below.

1. For someone who has had the notion that volume is an inherently unreliable measure, especially for baking, drilled into them for years, this is a hard pill to swallow. To be clear, I don’t mean calling for “1 cup of walnuts” in a recipe, I simply mean thinking about an inclusion’s volume rather than its weight is more useful when considering how much to use.