🥖Baker's Percentage Calculator

About this tool

List your ingredients with their weights, ticking which count as flour and which as liquid. The tool shows each ingredient as a percentage of the flour, the hydration and total, and scales the recipe to a target weight or a number of pieces.

Thinking in baker's percentages

In baker's percentages the total flour is always 100%, and every other ingredient is its weight divided by the flour weight. That makes a formula independent of batch size: a simple loaf of 500 g flour, 350 g water, 10 g salt and 7 g yeast becomes 100% / 70% / 2% / 1.4%, totalling 173.4%. The water percentage is the hydration, the best single guide to how a dough behaves: about 55–65% for bagels, pretzels and sandwich loaves, 65–75% for rustic loaves and pizza, and 75–85% or more for ciabatta and open-crumb sourdough. Salt usually sits at 1.8–2.2% and instant yeast at 0.5–1.5%. To scale, divide the target dough weight by the total percentage to get the flour, then multiply each percentage by it. Eight 80 g rolls (640 g) of the example need 369 g of flour. Mark wholewheat, rye or other flours as flour too. Honest limits: milk, eggs and butter contain water (about 87%, 75% and 16% respectively), so ticking them as liquid only approximates hydration, and wholegrain flours absorb more water. The pizza dough calculator and the yeast converter are related.

Frequently asked questions