Professional bakers express every ingredient as a percentage of the flour weight — flour is always 100%, whatever quantity is actually used. This works out those percentages, plus overall dough hydration, from your recipe’s weights.
How it works
Baker’s percentage
ingredient % = (ingredient weight ÷ flour weight) × 100
Flour’s own percentage is always exactly 100%, by definition — every other ingredient is measured against it.
Why anchor everything to flour
In an ordinary recipe, “percent of the total” shrinks every time an ingredient is added, since the total itself grows — genuinely awkward when scaling a recipe up or down. Anchoring every percentage to the one ingredient that doesn’t move relative to itself means changing the batch size is one multiplication applied to every ingredient, rather than a re-derivation of the whole recipe.
How to use this calculator
- Enter the weight of each ingredient in grams.
- Read hydration and each ingredient’s percentage of the flour weight.
Frequently asked questions
What is “hydration” in bread baking?
Water’s baker’s percentage specifically — the ratio of water to flour by weight. A higher hydration dough is wetter and generally produces a more open, irregular crumb; a lower hydration dough is stiffer and easier to shape.
Why can total ingredient percentages add up to more than 100%?
Because every percentage is measured against flour specifically, not against the total dough weight — so water, salt, yeast and everything else each get their own percentage relative to flour, and there’s no requirement that they sum to any particular number.
Does this work for recipes with multiple flours?
Enter their combined weight as the flour figure if you want one hydration percentage against the total flour blend — professional formulas sometimes track each flour separately, which this simplified version doesn’t do.
Why is baker’s percentage useful for scaling a recipe?
Because the percentages themselves don’t change when the batch size does — multiply the flour weight by any factor, and every other ingredient’s weight follows automatically from its already-known percentage, without re-deriving the whole recipe.
What’s a typical hydration range for bread?
It varies enormously by bread style — a stiff bagel dough might sit around 50–55%, an everyday sandwich loaf around 60–65%, and an open-crumb artisan loaf can run 75% or considerably higher.
