Home baker, or professional alike, calculating recipe into the desire 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 batch 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 serveral advantages of baker’s percentage:
- scale up or down the recipe efficiently. Everyone has differnet equipment/ space at home and quickly calculate the perfect recipe amount is the first step of making bread.
- 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 take for overproving.
- communicate the formula effectively. When sharing recipes with other bakers, it is the quickest way to understand the formula.
- 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 baker’s percentage, the flour, despite how many kinds of flour 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 |
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, auther 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 ingredeints in 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 baker’s percentage into weight
Simply multiply the desire flour weigh to all the ingredient percentage and you will get the weight of each ingredients.
Use the example 2 above:
First, I’m going to use 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 ingridents 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 to you anymore.
Hi FanFan, I really enjoyed your posts.
Your breakdown of baker’s percentage is brilliant👍
I would love to know how to start a “starter”, too.
Looking forward to reading about more of your bread making!
Hi Atsuko,
Thank you for the kind words. I’m working on that starter cultivating post. Please stay tuned. 🙂
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Thank you for your kind words.
I much appreciate it.