Baker's Percentage

Baker’s Percentage

Baker’s percentage is a notation system for bread recipes where every ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the total flour weight, not as a percentage of the total recipe weight. It is the universal language of professional bakers and the fastest way to read, compare, and scale any bread recipe.

How it works

All flour in the recipe — wheat flour, rye flour, spelt, whole wheat, flour kernels — is summed and set as 100%. Every other ingredient is then expressed as a weight percentage of that total flour weight.

This means the percentages in a baker’s percentage recipe do not add up to 100. They add up to the total percentage (tp), which for a typical lean bread is around 165–185%.

Example: spelt bread

Ingredient	Weight	Baker’s %
Wheat flour	375 g	75%
Spelt flour	125 g	25%
Total flour	500 g	100%
Salt	14 g	2.8%
Water	400 g	80%
Yeast	2 g	0.4%
Total	916 g	183.2%

What the numbers tell you

Experienced bakers can read a recipe’s character from its baker’s percentages alone:

Parameter	Range	Character
Hydration	50–57%	Dry dough — bagels, stiff rolls
	57–65%	Standard dough — white bread, rye
	65–80%+	Wet dough — ciabatta, no-knead, pizza
Fat	0–5%	Lean dough — hearth breads
	5–20%	Enriched dough — focaccia, cinnamon buns
	20%+	Rich dough — brioche
Salt	1.5–2.5%	Normal range; above 2.5% noticeably salty
Yeast	0.1–0.5%	Long fermentation (hours to overnight)
	1–2%	Fast fermentation (1–2 hours)

Low yeast % is intentional, not a typo — long, slow fermentation with minimal yeast develops more flavor than a fast rise. A recipe with 0.2% yeast is designed to ferment overnight in the fridge.

For laminated doughs (croissants, Danish pastry), rolling butter is typically expressed as 30–50% of the finished dough weight, not as baker’s percentage, because both dough and butter are pre-weighed complete assemblies.

Scaling a recipe

Baker’s percentages make scaling straightforward.

To convert from % to weight for a target batch:

Decide target total batch weight (e.g., 7,000 g for 10 × 700 g loaves)
Divide by total percentage to get the weight per percentage point: 7,000 ÷ 183.2 = 38.2 g/%
Multiply each ingredient’s % by that factor

To convert from weight to %:

Sum all flours → total flour weight (tfw)
For each ingredient: (ingredient weight ÷ tfw) × 100

Handling pre-ferments

A pre-ferment (poolish, biga, pâte fermentée) contains flour and water. Two conventions exist:

Treat pre-ferment as a single ingredient — calculate its total weight as a % of total flour. Simple, and useful when you make the pre-ferment in varying amounts or hydrations. The recipe’s true overall hydration is obscured.

Distribute the pre-ferment’s ingredients — add its flour to the total flour and its water to the total water. The overall hydration and salt percentages are then accurate. The pre-ferment must be a fixed, precise recipe for this to work.

Both conventions are valid. Consistency within a recipe is what matters.

Why weigh, never measure by volume

Baker’s percentage only works with weights. The same 1 kg of flour can range from under 1.5 liters (tightly packed, transported, compressed) to 2.5 liters (freshly sifted and airy) — a nearly 2:1 range in volume for identical weight. Volume measurements introduce this error directly into the hydration calculation, making recipe comparisons meaningless. Always weigh flour.