Baker's Percentage
Baker's percentage is a way of writing a recipe where every ingredient is shown as a percentage of the total flour weight, and the flour is always 100%. A bread with 1,000 g flour and 700 g water lists water as 70%. It's sometimes called baker's math or a formula, and it's the standard language of bread bakers.
The formula
Ingredient % = ingredient weight ÷ total flour weight × 100
Because everything is relative to flour, the percentages don't add up to 100. A lean bread often totals around 170–175%.
Example: a basic country loaf
| Ingredient | Baker's % | Weight for 1,000 g flour |
|---|---|---|
| Bread flour | 90% | 900 g |
| Whole wheat flour | 10% | 100 g |
| Water | 72% | 720 g |
| Salt | 2% | 20 g |
| Instant yeast | 0.7% | 7 g |
| Total | 174.7% | 1,747 g |
The water percentage is the dough hydration.
Scaling a recipe
Say you want two loaves of 900 g each (1,800 g total dough).
- Find the flour: 1,800 ÷ 174.7 × 100 = 1,030 g flour.
- Multiply each percentage by the flour: water 1,030 × 0.72 = 742 g, salt 1,030 × 0.02 = 21 g, yeast 1,030 × 0.007 = 7 g.
Add a few percent extra to cover dough left in the bowl.
Typical ranges
| Ingredient | Common range |
|---|---|
| Water (lean bread) | 60–80% |
| Salt | 1.8–2.2% |
| Instant yeast | 0.5–1.5% (less for long, cold rises) |
| Sourdough starter | 10–25% |
| Sugar (enriched breads) | 5–15% |
| Butter (brioche) | 20–60% |
Why bakers use it
- Scaling is instant. Make one loaf or a hundred without rounding mistakes.
- Recipes become comparable. You can see at a glance that one baguette is 68% hydration and another is 75%.
- Troubleshooting is easier. Salt at 3%? That explains the slow rise.
- Adjustments are precise. Swapping 20% of the flour for whole wheat is easy to calculate.
Pre-ferments and starters
With sourdough or a poolish, there are two approaches:
- Simple: list the starter as its own ingredient, for example 20%.
- Total formula: add the starter's flour and water into the dough totals. A 100% hydration starter is half flour, half water, so 200 g starter adds 100 g to both. This gives the true hydration and a fair comparison between recipes.
Always weigh ingredients for baker's percentage. Volume measures of flour vary too much for the math to mean anything; see cups to grams for flour if you need to convert an older recipe.
Questions
Why does flour always equal 100% in baker's percentage?
Flour is the main structural ingredient, so every other ingredient is measured against it. This keeps ratios constant whether you're making one loaf or fifty.
What is a typical salt percentage in bread?
Most breads use 1.8–2.2% salt relative to flour weight, so about 20 g salt per 1,000 g flour. Below about 1.5% bread tastes flat; above 2.5% it tastes salty and ferments slowly.
How do you scale a recipe using baker's percentage?
Add up all the percentages, divide your target dough weight by that total, and multiply by 100 to get the flour weight. Then multiply the flour weight by each ingredient's percentage.
How do multiple flours work in baker's percentage?
All flours together add up to 100%. For example, 80% bread flour plus 20% whole wheat flour equals 100%, and every other ingredient is still measured against that combined total.