Baker's Percentage Is Just a Ratio, and Ratios Are Just Code

Every bread recipe is secretly a function: flour weight in, everything else scaled proportionally out. Once I saw baker's percentages as just normalized ratios against total flour weight, writing a scaler was a Tuesday-night project rather than a research problem.

Crumb started as forty lines of JavaScript that did exactly that. The interesting engineering came later, once other bakers started asking for fermentation timers that accounted for ambient temperature — which turned out to need the same kind of careful state modeling as anything I'd worked on in grad school, just with butter instead of packets.