Baker's Percentage Calculator
Type your recipe in grams, tick which lines are flour, and read off every ingredient as a baker's percentage with the hydration. Then scale the whole formula to any flour weight.
| Ingredient | Grams | Flour? | Baker's % | Scaled to 1000 g flour |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100% | 1000 g | |||
| 70% | 700 g | |||
| 2% | 20 g | |||
| 0.6% | 6 g |
Total flour
500 g
= 100%
Hydration
70%
water-type ingredients ÷ flour
Total dough
863 g
173% of flour
Baker's % = ingredient ÷ total flour × 100. Tick every flour (bread, whole wheat, rye) so they sum to 100%. Hydration counts water, milk and other liquids named as such.
Reference formulas
The classic doughs, written the way a bakery would write them. Flour is always 100; read the water line for hydration. Any of these can be typed into the calculator above and scaled.
| Dough | Water | Salt | Yeast (IDY) | Fat | Sugar |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baguette | 68% | 2% | 0.5% | 0% | 0% |
| Country sourdough (levain 20%) | 75% | 2% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| Ciabatta | 80% | 2.2% | 0.4% | 2% | 0% |
| Focaccia | 78% | 2.2% | 0.7% | 8% | 0% |
| Neapolitan pizza | 62% | 2.8% | 0.2% | 0% | 0% |
| New York pizza | 63% | 2.5% | 0.4% | 2% | 1.5% |
| Sandwich loaf | 62% | 2% | 1.2% | 5% | 5% |
| Bagel | 57% | 2% | 0.8% | 0% | 3% |
| Brioche | 30% | 2% | 1.5% | 50% | 12% |
Brioche's liquid is mostly egg; its 30% "water" line is milk. Enriched doughs hydrate partly through eggs and butter.
Reading a formula
The water line tells you how the dough will handle before you touch it: under 60% kneads like clay, 65-72% is tacky but manageable, above 75% needs folds instead of kneading. The salt line should sit near 2; if it does not, check the recipe. The yeast line tells you the schedule: 1% or more is a two-hour dough, 0.2% is an overnight one. Fat above 5% softens the crumb and slows staling; sugar above 5% browns faster and feeds the yeast until, past 10%, it starts to slow it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is baker's percentage?
A way of writing a recipe where the flour is always 100% and every other ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the flour weight, not of the whole. 500 g flour, 350 g water, 10 g salt, 3 g yeast is written 100 / 70 / 2 / 0.6. The percentages sum to more than 100, which confuses people the first time; that is by design, because it makes hydration and salt visible at a glance and lets you scale to any batch size.
How do I calculate it?
Divide each ingredient's weight by the total flour weight and multiply by 100. If there are several flours, add them together first; they always sum to 100%. To go the other way, from percentages to grams, pick a flour weight and multiply each percentage by it.
What is a normal hydration and salt percentage?
Hydration: 55-60% for bagels and pretzels, 60-65% for sandwich loaves and pizza, 70-80% for ciabatta, focaccia and most sourdough. Salt: 1.8-2.2% for bread, 2.5-3% for pizza. Yeast: 0.2-1.5% instant depending on how long it ferments. Sugar and fat above 10% make it an enriched dough with different behaviour.
Why do professionals use it?
Three reasons. Scaling is trivial: change the flour weight and everything follows. Comparison is direct: two formulas at 68% and 78% hydration tell you the difference without converting. And errors are obvious: a formula with 5% salt or 40% hydration is wrong on its face, where 50 g salt in 1 kg flour might slip past.
These tools use baker's percentages, salt-by-weight brining, coffee ratios by weight and the USDA roasting and thawing tables, all stated on each page. They are starting points for your kitchen, your flour and your oven: taste the brine, watch the dough, and always cook poultry to 165°F on a thermometer.