Baker's Percentage Calculator

Type the total flour weight in grams. Each ingredient row has a name, a value and a mode: Grams if you know the weight, % if you know the baker's percentage. Switching a row's mode keeps the number you typed, so re-enter the value after switching. Add or remove rows to match your recipe. Name the water row "Water" so the calculator can pick it out as hydration.

The page opens with the lean loaf above already entered: flour 1,000 g, Water 650 g, Salt 20 g and Instant Yeast 10 g, all in grams mode. The results panel reads Hydration 65.0%, Total Dough Weight 1,680 g and Total Baker's Percentage 168.0%, with each row shown in both units: Water 650.0 g (65.0%), Salt 20.0 g (2.0%), Instant Yeast 10.0 g (1.0%).

Use the total as a cross-check. Dough weight ÷ total percentage × 100 should give back the flour: 1,680 ÷ 168 × 100 = 1,000 g. If it does not, a row is in the wrong mode.

Grams-mode row: percent = weight ÷ flour × 100.

%-mode row: weight = flour × percent ÷ 100.

Hydration = the percentage of the first row whose name contains "water". Milk, eggs or a levain are not counted as water unless you name them so.

Total dough weight = flour + the weight of every row.

Total baker's percentage = 100 + the percentage of every row.

Negative entries are treated as zero, and with zero flour every percentage reads zero.

Suppose you need three 900 g loaves of the same lean dough, 2,700 g in total. Divide the target by the total percentage to find the flour: 2,700 ÷ 1.68 = 1,607.1 g, so enter 1,607 g of flour.

Switch the other rows to % mode and enter 65, 2 and 1. The calculator returns Water 1,044.5 g, Salt 32.1 g and Instant Yeast 16.1 g, with a total dough weight of 2,700 g and hydration still 65.0%. King Arthur Baking's professional baker's percentage reference describes the same move: divide the desired dough weight by the sum of the percentages to get the conversion factor.

Scale a little above the target in practice. Dough sticks to the bowl and bench, so many bakers add 1-2% to the target before dividing.

Hydration is the number that most changes how a dough handles. Bagel doughs are stiff, commonly in the mid-50s, which is what gives a dense, chewy crumb and lets the rings hold their shape in the poaching water. Sandwich and pan loaves usually sit in the 60s; King Arthur Baking's reference works a white bread at 66% and a French bread at 65%. Ciabatta is a wet, slack dough, from the low 70s (73% in the same reference) up to around 80% for a very open crumb.

On 1,000 g of flour the difference is striking: a 55% bagel dough uses 550 g of water and an 80% ciabatta uses 800 g. Flour matters too. Whole-wheat and high-protein flours absorb more water, so the same percentage feels stiffer with them than with a low-protein white flour.

A sourdough levain or poolish is part flour and part water, and there are two ways to write it. The simple way treats it as one ingredient. Enter 900 g flour with Water 620 g, Levain 200 g and Salt 20 g: the calculator shows the levain at 22.2%, salt at 2.2% and hydration at 68.9%, for 1,740 g of dough.

That 68.9% understates how wet the dough is, because the levain carries water too. The overall formula splits a 100%-hydration levain into 100 g flour and 100 g water and adds them in: 1,000 g flour, 720 g water and 20 g salt. Now hydration is 72.0% and salt 2.0%, and the dough still weighs 1,740 g. When you compare your sourdough with a published formula, check which convention it uses; most serious formulas quote overall hydration, with the levain's flour counted in the 100%.

Counting only one flour as 100%. If a loaf uses 800 g bread flour and 200 g whole-wheat flour, the flours together are the 100%, at 80% and 20%. Enter 1,000 g as the flour weight, not 800 g, or every other percentage comes out a quarter too high.

Using percent of total dough. A recipe that says salt is "1.2%" may mean 1.2% of the whole dough. On the 1,680 g lean dough that is about 20 g, which is 2% in baker's percentage. Check which one a source means before copying the number.

Weighing small ingredients on a coarse scale. At 500 g of flour, 1% yeast is 5 g and 0.2% is 1 g. A kitchen scale that reads in whole grams can double or halve an ingredient that small, so small-batch bakers often use a 0.1 g pocket scale for salt and yeast.

The calculator does the arithmetic, not the baking. It cannot tell you whether a dough will be workable, how long it should ferment, or how water absorption changes with flour type. It does not break preferments into flour and water for you, and it only recognises hydration from a row with "water" in its name, so milk-based doughs need their hydration worked out separately. Weights are in grams only.

Baker's percentage scales dough by flour weight. For recipes that are not built around flour, such as a cake batter measured in cups or a stew for twelve, the Recipe Scaler Calculator multiplies every ingredient by a serving factor instead. Coffee is built on the same kind of fixed ratio, and the Coffee Brew Ratio Calculator sets grams of coffee against water in a way any baker will recognise.