Baker's Percentage Calculator

Baker's percentage expresses every ingredient as a proportion of the flour, which is always 100 percent. Enter a flour weight and the percentages for water, salt, yeast and optionally sugar and fat, and you get the exact weight of each, the total dough weight and the hydration. The convention is what lets a formula scale to any batch and lets two recipes be compared at a glance, regardless of how much bread each of them makes.

The first thing to accept is that the percentages add up to more than a hundred, and that this is correct rather than a mistake. Flour is the denominator, not the total. A straightforward loaf at 500 g of flour, 65 percent water, 2 percent salt and 1 percent yeast comes to 325 g, 10 g and 5 g respectively, and 840 g of dough — the 168 percent is the sum of the parts against the flour, which is exactly what you want when doubling the batch means multiplying one number.

Hydration is the figure bakers actually talk in, and it maps to handling more than to taste. Somewhere around 60 to 65 percent gives a dough that holds its shape and takes a knead; 70 to 75 is the open-crumb artisan range and starts to stick; past 80 the dough is closer to a batter and needs folding rather than kneading. But the percentage is only comparable within a flour: wholemeal and rye absorb considerably more water than white flour of the same weight, so an identical hydration number feels dry in one and slack in the other. The number is a starting point in a new flour, not a target.

The mistake that quietly breaks a formula is a preferment. A poolish, biga or sourdough levain contains flour and water, and both have to be counted in the totals — the flour in the levain is part of the 100 percent, and its water is part of the hydration. A formula that treats the levain as a separate ingredient at, say, 20 percent, and then computes hydration from the added water alone, understates the real hydration by several points and produces a wetter dough than the numbers promised.