Bakerman is baking bread

Like a lot of people I know, I really got into baking during COVID. Started with sourdough of course, didn’t really work out. The love of baking stuck though. Over the years, many great breads made from a mix of buckwheat, rye and whole wheat were baked and eaten, usually while still hot. Also, many, many failed attempts – I even managed to make a normally leavened bread that was flatter than the flattest flat bread in existence … probably 🙂

I also make a pretty good pizza napoletana – or as close to it as I can get with a home oven. At least my kid says it’s the best pizza ever.

Anyway, I really didn’t like calculating all the ratios in my head or on a piece of paper, and I couldn’t find a simple baker’s calculator that wasn’t riddled with ads, popups and whatnot, and surprisingly, one that didn’t ask:

How much flour are you willing to sacrifice today?

Instead of what’s really important:

How big do you want your bread or pizza to be?

So I wrote my own. It lives here: rkrajnc.github.io/bakers-calculator

It’s one HTML page, a little JavaScript, and localStorage for saved recipes. No backend, login, or analytics. No cookies to improve your experience – other than the ones you’ll bake yourself.

Unit switching is in there because not everyone weighs in grams, and recipes from elsewhere should still work. If you want pounds, you can have pounds. I won’t judge you, but I will quietly convert everything to grams under the hood, because grams is the only honest unit for baking.

It’s also a PWA, so you can install it on your phone or tablet – perfect for the kitchen.

Try it! The source is on Github: github.com/rkrajnc/bakers-calculator

Now if you’ll excuse me, the kid wants pizza.