About Kitchen Sums

Kitchen Sums is a set of free calculators for the parts of cooking that are arithmetic: dough by baker's percentage, brine by salt weight, coffee by ratio, pizzas by slices per person, turkey by pounds. Each one shows the formula it uses and a table, so the answer can be checked, or learned and never looked up again.

The conventions

Dough tools use baker's percentages: flour is 100% and everything else is a share of the flour weight, which is how professional formulas are written and why a recipe can be scaled to any size. Brines use salt as a percentage of water weight (classic), of water plus meat (equilibrium) or of meat alone (dry), converted to teaspoons for the salt brand you have, because a teaspoon of Diamond Crystal weighs less than half a teaspoon of table salt. Coffee is measured by weight with 1 ml of water = 1 g, and the Specialty Coffee Association's 55 g per litre is the reference point. Turkey roasting and thawing times are the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service tables, which are the ones on the back of the bag.

What this site doesn't do

It doesn't store what you enter, require an account, or replace a thermometer. Flours absorb water differently, ovens run hot or cold, and the right dough is the one that feels right in your hands. Poultry and pork are done at a safe internal temperature, not at a time.

Corrections

If a formula, convention or table here is wrong, email hello@kitchensums.com. The maths is stated on each page so a correction can be checked against it.