🍞 Baker's Percentage Calculator
Enter your flour and the other ingredients by weight, and get each one as a baker's percentage plus the dough hydration, the language of every serious bread recipe.
| Ingredient | Grams | Baker's % | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flour | 500 | 100% | |
| 70% | |||
| 2% | |||
| 1% |
Hydration
70%
liquid ÷ flour
Total dough weight
865 g
Baker's percentages express every ingredient relative to the flour (always 100%). Hydration counts rows named water/milk/juice/beer. A lean bread is ~60-65% hydration; ciabatta and focaccia run 75%+. 🔒 In your browser.
How the baker's percentage calculator works
In baker's percentage, the flour is always 100%, and every other ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the flour weight: an ingredient’s weight ÷ flour weight × 100. Hydration is the total liquid (water, milk) as a percentage of flour. This lets you scale a formula to any batch size and compare recipes on equal terms. Worked through: with 500 g flour and 325 g water, hydration is 325 ÷ 500 × 100 = 65%; 10 g of salt is 10 ÷ 500 × 100 = 2%. When a recipe uses more than one flour, the total flour is still the 100% baseline, and each flour is also given as its own share of that total.
Percentages can total well over 100%, that’s normal, because each is relative to the flour, not to the whole. A lean bread dough runs about 60-65% hydration; rustic, open-crumb loaves like ciabatta and focaccia go to 75% and beyond.
Frequently asked questions
What is baker's percentage?
A way of writing recipes where the flour is 100% and every other ingredient is a percentage of the flour weight. So 350 g water with 500 g flour is 70% water. It makes scaling and comparing bread formulas easy.
What is dough hydration?
The weight of liquid (water, milk) as a percentage of the flour. 500 g flour with 350 g water is 70% hydration. Higher hydration gives a wetter, stickier dough and a more open crumb.
Why can the percentages add up to more than 100%?
Because each is measured against the flour, not the total. Flour is 100% by definition, water might be 70%, salt 2% and so on. They’re independent ratios, so the sum can exceed 100%.
What hydration should my bread be?
Around 60-65% for a standard sandwich loaf, 70% for many artisan breads, and 75-85% for ciabatta, focaccia and high-hydration sourdough. Higher hydration is harder to handle but gives an airier crumb.
How do I scale a recipe with baker's percentages?
Choose your total flour weight, then multiply it by each ingredient’s percentage. Want 1 kg of flour at 70% hydration and 2% salt? That’s 700 g water and 20 g salt. The percentages stay fixed at any batch size.
How do I include the water in a sourdough starter or preferment?
For accurate hydration, split your starter or preferment into its flour and water parts and add each to the totals. A 100 g starter at 100% hydration is 50 g flour and 50 g water, so those join the flour total and the water total before you work out the overall percentages, otherwise the true hydration reads lower than it is.
What is a typical salt percentage in bread?
Around 1.8-2.2% of the flour weight, with 2% the common default, enough to season the dough and control fermentation without tasting salty. Below about 1% bread tastes flat; much above 2.5% it starts to slow the yeast noticeably. Expressing salt as a percentage is what keeps it correct at any batch size.