Baker's Percentage Calculator

What baker's percentage is

Baker's percentage writes every ingredient as a share of flour weight. Flour is always 100%. Water at 70% of a 500 g flour batch is 350 g, not 70% of the finished dough.

Home recipes hide that relationship. Cups of flour change with scooping, and a "2% salt" note is meaningless until you know the flour grams. Once flour is the base, you can compare two breads, scale a Saturday loaf to a class party, and see why one dough feels slack while another stands up in a pan.

This page reports hydration, salt baker %, and yeast baker % from the four weights you enter. It does not fold starter flour into the base. Preferments belong on the sourdough hydration tool.

Parents use the same math when a school bake sale needs six baguettes instead of two. Keep the percents. Change only flour grams. The water, salt, and yeast follow.

[1][2]

How to use this calculator

Weigh flour, water, salt, and yeast in grams. Enter those four numbers. The defaults are 500 g flour, 350 g water, 10 g salt, and 7 g yeast, a lean dough many sandwich loaves sit near.

Read hydration first. That is water divided by flour, times 100. Then check salt and yeast percents. If you are copying a bakery formula, keep those percents and change only the flour grams when you scale.

Skip volume for the percents. A US cup of all-purpose flour is about 120 g in many test kitchens and about 125 g in USDA FoodData Central household portions. Either way, the percent math needs mass.

[2][3][4]

Formula and a worked example

Baker % = (ingredient grams ÷ flour grams) × 100. Hydration uses the same rule with water as the ingredient.

Using the defaults: hydration is 350 ÷ 500 × 100 = 70.0%. Salt is 10 ÷ 500 × 100 = 2.0%. Yeast is 7 ÷ 500 × 100 = 1.40%. Those three numbers are what the widget prints.

To double the batch, keep 70%, 2%, and 1.4% and set flour to 1,000 g. Water becomes 700 g, salt 20 g, yeast 14 g. The dough should behave like the original if flour protein and mix time stay similar.

[1][2]

Typical baker percents for home bread

Lean doughs (flour, water, salt, yeast) often land between 60% and 75% hydration. Pan breads cluster toward the lower half so they slice cleanly. Ciabatta-style doughs sit higher and need more handling skill.

Salt near 1.8% to 2.2% of flour is common in professional lean formulas. Yeast baker % depends on time and yeast type. Instant yeast at about 1% of flour is a fast home loaf. A long, cool ferment uses far less.

Sweet doughs add sugar and fat that the four-field widget does not see. You can still compute hydration, salt, and yeast on the flour, then write sugar and butter percents on paper. A 12% sugar dough tastes like a school-lunch roll. A 25% sugar dough is closer to a cinnamon bun.

Whole-grain flour drinks water. A 68% hydration that slumps on white bread flour can look dry on a 40% whole-wheat mix. Raise water in 10 g steps and record the new hydration so next week's bake is not a guess.

[1][5]

Why flour is the 100% base

Dough strength comes from gluten-forming proteins in wheat flour. Water, salt, and yeast all act on that protein network, so bakers compare them to flour, not to total dough mass.

A formula that sums to 168% of flour (100% flour + 66% water + 2% salt + extra) is normal. Those percents do not have to add to 100%. That is the difference between baker's math and a nutrition-label percent.

[1]

How to weigh the inputs

Tare a bowl, add flour, record grams. Weigh water in the same units. Table salt and kosher salt have different crystal sizes, so a teaspoon is a poor stand-in for 10 g. Instant, active dry, and fresh yeast are not 1:1 by volume. Convert yeast types on the yeast converter if your bag is a different form.

USDA FoodData Central lists enriched all-purpose flour at 125 g per cup as a household measure. This site's grams-to-cups tool uses 120 g per cup to match common test-kitchen spoon-and-level practice. Pick one convention and stay on it for a formula.

If a family recipe lists only cups, weigh one cup of your scooping style once, write the grams on the card, and use that number as flourG from then on. The percent math is only as stable as that habit.

[3][4]

Reading hydration against dough feel

Seventy percent hydration on bread flour feels different from 70% on a low-protein cake flour. Protein, bran, and whole-grain absorbency change how much free water you see.

If the dough tears instead of stretching, hydration may be low or gluten is underdeveloped. If it puddles on the bench, hydration may be high for that flour, or mix time was short. Change one variable, then recheck the percents so you can write down what worked.

Mixers add energy. A dough that feels dry after 2 minutes in a stand mixer can look wet after 8 minutes because gluten has trapped the water. Judge hydration after a short rest, not only at the first scrape of the bowl.

Salt tightens gluten. If you forgot the salt and the dough felt slack, add the missing grams and give it a few minutes. Recalculate baker % so the notebook matches the bowl you actually baked.

[1][6]

Starter, poolish, and what this tool omits

A poolish or sourdough starter is flour plus water (and a little yeast). If you treat 100 g of 100% starter as "just another ingredient," you undercount both flour and water in the true dough hydration.

King Arthur's professional reference splits a preferment into its flour and water and then recomputes overall baker percents. Use the sourdough hydration calculator for that split. This page stays on the four direct weights.

A biga kept at 50% hydration is mostly flour. Dumping 150 g of that biga into a 500 g flour dough adds far more flour than water. The sourdough tool will show that. This tool will not, because it never asks for starter.

If you only want to know "is my Tuesday sandwich dough the same as last Tuesday," the four-field page is enough. Save the preferment math for the weekend loaf that uses a jar from the fridge.

[1]

Kids in the kitchen and dough safety

Raw wheat flour is not a ready-to-eat food. FDA has warned that flour can carry pathogens such as E. coli until it is baked. Do not let children eat raw dough or lick the bowl.

Bake bread until the crumb is set. Leftover slices go in the fridge within 2 hours. Reheat leftovers to 165 °F if you are warming a stuffed or meat-filled loaf.

A play-dough afternoon with leftover yeast dough is still a raw-flour activity. Wash hands and tools with soap. Keep the raw bowl away from ready-to-eat fruit on the same counter.

If you egg-wash rolls, treat leftover wash like other egg foods. Egg dishes and leftover casseroles use 160 °F and 165 °F on the FoodSafety.gov chart. Do not park an egg-wash cup on a warm stove for an hour while you shape a second tray.

[7][8][9]

Scaling for a bake-sale tray

Suppose last week 500 g flour made two sandwich loaves and the percents were 70% water, 2% salt, and 1.4% yeast. A bake sale wants five of those loaves. Five-halves of 500 g is 1,250 g flour. Water is 0.70 × 1,250 = 875 g. Salt is 0.02 × 1,250 = 25 g. Yeast is 0.014 × 1,250 = 17.5 g.

If your mixer bowl only holds 1 kg of dough, split the scaled formula into two bowls with the same percents. Do not guess a "splash more water" in the second bowl. That splash is a new hydration you did not write down.

Yeast amount also tracks time. A 17.5 g instant-yeast dose in a hot kitchen can blow past the window before you shape five loaves. Drop yeast baker % and give the dough a cooler rise rather than changing hydration to slow it down.

Write the four weights on a sticky note on the flour bin. Kids who help measure can check the note against the scale. That is how baker % turns into a household habit instead of a one-off calculator visit.

[1][5]

Accuracy limits

Percents cannot fix a weak flour, a dead yeast packet, or a kitchen at 90 °F. They also ignore eggs, sugar, and fat unless you add those grams yourself and compute extra percents on paper.

Altitude, water hardness, and mixers change dough even when the percents match a printed formula. Treat the output as a scale, not a guarantee of oven spring.

[5][6]

How it works

Scaling a dough means keeping percents fixed while changing flour grams. Typical lean bread hydration is 60 to 75%.

Frequently asked questions

• Does starter count as flour?

  For a preferment, split starter into flour and water using its hydration, then add those to totals. The sourdough hydration tool does that.

Related calculators

References

1. King Arthur Baking. Baker's Percentage
2. King Arthur Baking. Baker's percentage (worked method)
3. USDA. FoodData Central
4. USDA FoodData Central. Wheat flour, white, all-purpose, enriched, bleached (household cup)
5. King Arthur Baking. Professional baker's reference: yeast
6. USDA FSIS. High altitude cooking
7. FDA. Raw dough
8. USDA Ask FSIS. What is the 2 Hour Rule with leaving food out?
9. USDA FSIS. Safe minimum internal temperature chart