Cayman,
No need to apologize. All of the dough calculating tools are intended to be used with known, and hopefully workable, dough formulations where the baker's percents are known or can be calculated. However, there is nothing to stop anyone from entering whatever set of baker's percents or other inputs into any tool that they wish, for whatever reason. The risk, of course, is that if the baker's percents and other inputs are not workable in terms of producing a functional dough, you can end up with a failed dough/pizza. So, it takes a pretty good working knowledge about doughs and bakers percents to make these kinds of changes.
To answer your qustions, if one assumes a fixed dough weight, changing the hydration value in a dough calculating tool will affect the values of other ingredients in the dough formulation. The hydration values I gave for the different flours are correct except for the all-purpose flour it would be 60% (this is about right for most all-purpose flours). However, in practice, people, both professionals and home pizza makers alike, often use a range of hydration values that can vary quite widely. When in doubt about what hydration value to use for a given type of flour, I usually start with the rated absorption value for that flour and make adjustments, if needed, after I have used the dough and assessed the results.
To show you how values can change with different flours with different hydration values, consider the following two examples using the expanded dough calculating tool at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/expanded_calculator.html where the only changes are the hydration. For purposes of the two examples, I have assumed a fixed dough weight of 20 ounces. The first example might apply to a dough formulation using all-purpose flour; the second example might apply to a dough formulation using high-gluten flour.
Flour (100%):
Water (60%):
IDY (0.40%):
Salt (1.75%):
Olive Oil (1%):
Sugar (1%):
Total (164.15%):
| 345.42 g | 12.18 oz | 0.76 lbs
207.25 g | 7.31 oz | 0.46 lbs
1.38 g | 0.05 oz | 0 lbs | 0.46 tsp | 0.15 tbsp
6.04 g | 0.21 oz | 0.01 lbs | 1.08 tsp | 0.36 tbsp
3.45 g | 0.12 oz | 0.01 lbs | 0.77 tsp | 0.26 tbsp
3.45 g | 0.12 oz | 0.01 lbs | 0.87 tsp | 0.29 tbsp
567 g | 20 oz | 1.25 lbs | TF = N/A
|
Flour (100%):
Water (63%):
IDY (0.40%):
Salt (1.75%):
Olive Oil (1%):
Sugar (1%):
Total (167.15%):
| 339.22 g | 11.97 oz | 0.75 lbs
213.71 g | 7.54 oz | 0.47 lbs
1.36 g | 0.05 oz | 0 lbs | 0.45 tsp | 0.15 tbsp
5.94 g | 0.21 oz | 0.01 lbs | 1.06 tsp | 0.35 tbsp
3.39 g | 0.12 oz | 0.01 lbs | 0.75 tsp | 0.25 tbsp
3.39 g | 0.12 oz | 0.01 lbs | 0.85 tsp | 0.28 tbsp
567 g | 20 oz | 1.25 lbs | TF = N/A
|
As you can see, the differences in the ingredients other than the flour and water do not change much. In fact, unless you have a special scale that can handle small weights of ingredients, the differences are so slight as not to be able to measure the ingredients out to their exact values. In my case, I use a quality digital scale to weigh out the flour and water and for the rest of the ingredient I use the volume measurements. I would have to make a quite large dough batch to find it useful to weigh the ingredients other than the flour and water.
You might play around with the expanded dough calculating tool to get a better feel for how it works but I wouldn't get too hung up over it as this early stage of your learning process. In my opinion, it is far more important that you find a good dough recipe to practice with until you have mastered it. Then you can decide what changes you might want to make to the recipe to improve it for your purposes.
Peter
