Board & PinAbout Board & Pin
A bench, a pin, and a notebook that refuses to round anything off.
Why this site exists
Most pasta instructions are written in cups and handfuls, and they stop working the moment your flour is a different flour. Board & Pin keeps a single file per dough instead: the weight of every flour, the weight of every liquid, and the ratio between them expressed as a baker’s percentage. Change the flour and you change one number, not the whole method.
Every card is cooked and weighed on a 0.1 g scale on the same bench. Flour weights are recorded before the dough is mixed and the dough is weighed again after resting, so a card that claims 586 g of dough is a card where the dough actually came out at 586 g. When a batch does not land where the arithmetic says it should, the batch is re-made rather than the arithmetic adjusted.
How the numbers are arrived at
Hydration here is total liquid weight divided by total flour weight. A whole egg counts as 50 g of liquid, a yolk as 17 g, a vegetable purée at its full weight because it is mostly water, and a drained ricotta as an add-in rather than a liquid. Those four conventions cover every card on the site, so two cards can be compared without reading the method twice.
Roller settings are given as notch numbers off a 150 mm hand-cranked machine, with the calliper measurement beside each one. Not every machine is ground to the same tolerance, which is why the millimetre figure is printed next to the notch on every card: if your notch 6 measures 1.4 mm rather than 1.6 mm, trust the number and stop one notch earlier.
What is not here
There are no sponsored ingredients on this site and no brand pays for a mention. Where a particular grind or a particular durum is named — 00, semolina rimacinata, stone-ground whole wheat — the reason is on the card, and a substitute is named when there is one.
Nothing on the site is written by a machine and nothing is padded to fill a word count. Cards are added at a deliberately slow rate, a few days apart, because each one is made in a kitchen first.