What is Baker's Percentage?
Baker's percentage is a mathematical method widely used in baking to calculate the amounts of ingredients. Instead of expressing recipes in cups or absolute weights, every ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the total flour weight.
This means Total Flour is always exactly 100%. If a recipe has multiple flours (e.g., 80% bread flour, 20% whole wheat), their percentages add up to 100%.
Why Use It?
- Scalability: You can easily scale a recipe up or down by simply changing the total flour weight. All other ingredients scale proportionally.
- Consistency: It helps visualize the structure of the dough. For example, knowing a dough is 75% hydration (water) gives you an immediate idea of how sticky or workable it will be.
- Troubleshooting: Comparing recipes is much easier when they are normalized into percentages.
How to Use This Tool
This calculator is fully reactive. You can:
- Scale a recipe: Change the "Total Flour" or "Total Dough" weight at the top. Everything else will update.
- Develop a recipe: Enter your ingredients and tweak their percentages. The gram amounts will calculate automatically based on the total flour.
- Convert a recipe: If you have a recipe in grams, type the gram amounts into the weight columns. The percentages will be calculated for you.