"Mike Avery" > wrote in message
news:mailman.5.1070152407.204.rec.food.sourdough@m ail.otherwhen.com...

> Part of the fun is that there isn't a standardized substance called
"flour". It's
> not like water, where we can specify a gathering of pure molecules of
water
> and oxygen. Plant genetics, growing conditions, harvesting, milling, and
more
> all change what's in the sack. From year to year, from sack to sack,
there
> are differences beyond the differences in the amount of water in the
flour.

This is exactly what I'm afraid of!
Recipes like : 1 cup starter, 3 cups flour, ..etc are worrying me much more
than the Detmolder "impossible" 3-stage process!
What does "1 cup of starter" means?
Is it plain grain wheat starter or is it rye flour starter? How much is it
the hydration?
What does "3 cups of flour" means?
Is it plain grain milled at 1 or 8 (1=very fine, 8 big partciles, almost
like corn flakes)?

The foundamental of the repetability lies in the clear description of the
adopted method together with the precise quantities of ingredients.
It seems to me that with peculiar reference to weights and volumes you have
advantages and disadvantages, both streaming or leading to water content
problems.
For sure you know EXACTLY the water YOU introduce in your dough.
In this case no disputes are possible, volume and weights are identical.
Concerning the flour (and therefore the starter) the volume is the same but
it can contain a lot of water, the weight viceversa is falsed by the amount
of water trapped into the flour.

Crazy idea: is it possible to help the opposite party giving the value of
the air humidity?
I'm quite sure that the water trapped in the flour is directly dependent on
this value allowing you to translate from cups to grams and back without
appreciable losses.

Of course this is only an appendix !
Before everything else, I like very much the use of clear terms (home
freshly milled plain grain rye flour 4 over 8 (= mid dimension of particles
in a scale from 1 to 8), industrial milled hard wheat flour type 550 (in
Germany) or "0" (in Italy), etc.

Luke