What Is Baker’s Percentage? How Can I Apply To My Daily Baking?

Home baker, or professional alike, calculating recipes into the desired formula is a task you and I would encounter all the time.

When I look for new recipe inspiration online, it’s very often that the total weight of dough is too heavy for my stand mixer to work properly. I have to re-calculate all the ingredients into smaller batches before I can start making bread. For me, it takes plenty of time to do the math and especially when there are hundreds of ingredients in the recipe.. If I am lucky enough, I would find recipes that also provide baker’s percentage. It allows me to do the math in no time!

Baker’s percentage or baker’s math/ formula percentage is a ratio of flour and other ingredients. It allows bakers to calculate the desired dough weight in a short time.

There are several advantages of baker’s percentage:

1. scale up or down the recipe efficiently. Everyone has different equipment/ space at home and quickly calculating the perfect recipe amount is the first step of making bread.
2. predict the dough’s behavior. When you see the water content in a recipe is more than 80%, you would straight away know that it is a high hydration dough and it is likely the dough will be difficult to handle. Another example, with more starter involved, the fermentation time will be shorter and care must be taken for overproving.
3. communicate the formula effectively. When sharing recipes with other bakers, it is the quickest way to understand the formula.
4. add in/remove or exchange ingredients without affecting the whole formula.

So, what is this magical baker’s percentage that I love so much? How to calculate it?

It is different than the percentage we use in daily life. In the baker’s percentage, the flour, despite how many kinds of flour are in the recipe, will always be 100%. By comparing the weight of other ingredients to the total flour weight, we will get the ingredient percentage.

ingredient percentage = ingredient weight / total flour weight x 100%

Example 1. Simply sourdough recipe (from The Clever Carrot)

weight	ingredient
500g	bread flour
250g	water
150g	starter
25g	olive oil
10g	sea salt

The first thing is to set the flour as 100%. Then we can calculate other ingredients.

flour = 100%

water: 250 / 500 X 100% = 50%

starter: 150 / 500 X 100% = 30%

olive oil: 25 / 500 x 100% = 5%

sea salt: 10 / 500 X 100% = 2%

Example 2. jalapeno & cheese loaf (from Vanessa Kimbell, author of “The Sourdough School”)

weight	ingtedient
700g	strong white flour
200g	wholegrain flour
100g	corn meal
10g	malt powder
225g	starter
800g	water
20g	olive oil
18g	fine sea salt

In this case, we are going to include cornmeal as part of flour. The total weight of strong white flour, wholegrain flour and cornmeal is 1000g (700+200+100) and it will be presented as 100%.

Now we can calculate all the ingredients in the baker’s percentage.

strong white flour: 700 / 1000 X 100% = 70%

wholegrain flour: 200 / 1000 X 100% = 20%

cornmeal: 100 / 1000 X 100% = 10%

malt powder: 10 / 1000 X 100% = 1%

starter: 225 / 1000 X 100% = 22.5%

water: 800 / 1000 X 100% = 80%

olive oil: 20 / 1000 X 100% = 2%

sea salt: 18 / 1000 X 100% = 1.8%

To convert the baker’s percentage into weight

Simply multiply the desired flour weight by all the ingredient percentages and you will get the weight of each ingredient.

Use the example 2 above:

First, I’m going to use a total of 500g flour as it works the best for my mixer.

strong white flour: 500 X 70% = 350g

wholegrain flour: 500 X 20% = 100g

cornmeal: 500 X 10% = 50g

malt powder: 500 X 1% = 5g

starter : 500 X 22.5% = 112.5g

water: 500 X 80% = 400g

olive oil: 500 x 2% = 10g

sea salt: 500 X 1.8% = 9g

Voila! I have an adjusted recipe that ensures all ingredients would fit in my mixer.

At the end

Baker’s percentage is the only math you need to know when it comes to baking. Once you understand how to convert it, adjusting recipes won’t be a nightmare for you anymore.