Baker's Percentage Calculator

How to use the baker’s percentage calculator

1. Choose Metric (g) or Imperial (oz).
2. In Calculate, pick what you know: - Weights from a total flour weight: you know how much flour you want to use; - Weights from a total dough weight: you want, say, 1.5 kg of dough for three loaves; - Percentages from weights: you have a recipe in grams or ounces and want its formula.
3. Enter the Total flour weight or Total dough weight when asked.
4. Edit the Ingredients: a name, a Type (Flour, Water or liquid, Sourdough starter (100% hydration) or Other) and a percentage or a weight. Add an ingredient adds a row, Remove deletes one, Reset example brings back the basic lean dough.
5. Read the Formula table, the Total flour, Total dough, Total percentage and Hydration. The steps under the table show every multiplication.

When you switch between percentages and weights, the values you already have are carried over, so you can start from a recipe in grams, get its percentages, then rescale it to another flour weight.

What baker’s percentages are

In baker’s math, every ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the total flour weight, and the flour is always 100%. A basic lean dough reads flour 100%, water 65%, salt 2%, instant yeast 1%. The percentages add up to more than 100% (here 168%), and that is normal: they describe proportions relative to the flour, not shares of the dough.

The formulas the tool uses are:

• weight = flour weight × percentage ÷ 100;
• flour weight = dough weight ÷ (total percentage ÷ 100);
• percentage = ingredient weight ÷ total flour weight × 100.

Example: for 1,680 g of dough at 168%, the flour is 1,680 ÷ 1.68 = 1,000 g, the water 650 g, the salt 20 g and the yeast 10 g.

When a recipe uses several flours (bread flour and whole wheat, for example), mark each one as Flour. Their percentages must add up to 100%, and in reverse mode their weights are added together to form the 100%.

Hydration

Hydration is the weight of the liquids divided by the weight of the flour. Around 55–60% gives a firm bagel or pretzel dough, 62–68% a typical sandwich or pizza dough, 70–80% an open-crumb loaf like ciabatta or many sourdoughs. Whole grain flours absorb more water, so the same hydration feels stiffer.

A sourdough starter contains both flour and water. With the Sourdough starter (100% hydration) type, the tool also shows Hydration including starter, where half of the starter weight counts as flour and half as water. That is the figure bakers compare when they talk about “true” or overall hydration.

Milk, eggs, butter and honey also bring water, but less than their full weight (whole milk is about 87% water). Enter them as Other if you want the hydration to count only water, or as Water or liquid for a quick approximation.