Holly and Satyen,
It is almost impossible to come up with a chart that solves or mitigates hydration issues. What complicates matters is that there are no standards as to what terms like all purpose flour, bread flour and high gluten flour even mean. So millers have a fair amount of latitude in designating their flours by type. For example, all purpose flour can vary all over the place in terms of protein content. For example, it can be as low as the 9% range whereas for pizza dough you may want to use over 10% for all purpose flour. Also, wheat crops vary from year to year and although millers try to come up with standardized formulations so that bakers don't have to worry much about the flours they use, there can still be variations that call for the bakers to test their flours before going into major production. And, if in a given year there is a lot of starch damage, that can affect the performance of the flour with the high levels of starch damage. Fortunately for us in the U.S., that is more of a problem with flours in other countries, such as Mexico. I might add that millers outside of the U.S. very often give recommended rated absorption rates for their flours in their specs. Caputo is a good example of this (see
http://caputoflour.com/).
Having given the above disclaimers, my practice when using a new flour where I do not have a good idea as to its rated absorption value has been to use about 59-60% hydration for pizza doughs using all purpose flour, about 61-62% for bread flour, and about 63-64% for high gluten flour. Holly's All Trumps high gluten flour fall in the last range mentioned. However, the above percents can swing in either direction by a percent or two. Bakers know this so they usually test their flours before going hog wild with their bread products.
To the above, I would add that one source that does a pretty decent job of correlating protein content with absorption values is a document that was put out by Pendleton Mills. Pendleton is now called Grain Craft. After that change, the document referenced above disappeared from the Grain Craft website. However, I found it archived in the Wayback Machine. The pertinent part of that document is numbered page 5 at:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141109232607/http://www.pfmills.com/filebin/pdf/technical_informational_booklet_v1-opt.pdf.
However, I must issue a caution as to the above document. Pendleton lumps bread flours with high gluten flours. I would put the top four flours in the high gluten category (some millers call the lower ones in that category "premium" or mid-high gluten flours). The other thing I would add is that the Pendleton flours tended to have higher rated absorption values that similar flours from other millers. I once had a conversation with a Pendleton employee about the 65-68% absorption values for the high gluten flours, which I thought was very high, and he said that those numbers were correct because of the particular wheat grains they used to make their flours.
A final point to consider is to take into account any oil in a dough recipe in calculating the hydration value to use. For example, if a formula hydration in a recipe has a value, say 63%, and a decision is made to add some oil to the recipe, for example, 3%, then the 63% number should be reduced to 63-3 = 61% since oil also has a "wetting" effect even though it does not hydrate the flour.
Peter
