Weekly sourdough recipes and tips from an experienced baker and homesteader, with a focus on 100% whole grains. Subscribe today to get a free eBook of sourdough discard recipes.
Share
Understanding bakers percentages
Published 18 days ago • 3 min read
Understanding bakers percentages
Firstly, I should say that there is no need to know anything about baker’s percentages to start making great bread, but understanding this stuff is helpful when it comes to tinkering with recipes, making larger or smaller batches, and understanding the differences between recipes and how different levels of water, starter, and salt affect the dough.
Bakers percentages for the beginners whole wheat bread recipe shared here.
Flour percentages
Baker’s percentages might look confusing at first glance because the total always adds up to more than 100%. To easily understand baker’s percentages, keep in mind that the total amount of flour is always 100%, so for a recipe using 300g rye and 700g wheat flour, the baker’s percentage for the flours would be 30% and 70%, and for a loaf made with only one kind of flour, the percentage of that flour is 100%.
When a recipe talks about using, for example, 10% rye, this doesn’t mean that 10% of the total dough weight is rye, but that 10% of the flour is rye flour.
Hydration percentage and other ingredients
The percentage of every other ingredient in the bread is calculated around the flour percentage. For example, to figure out the percentage of water in a recipe containing 750g flour and 700g water, simply divide 700g by 750g, and you will end up with 0.93, now multiply this number by 100 and this will give you 93, which means that the hydration percentage is 93%. The same method goes for every other ingredient: just take the ingredient weight and divide it by the flour weight, and then multiply it by 100 to get the percentage.
If you want to create a bread with a specific level of hydration, such as the 93% above, simply get the total weight of flours you’ll be using and multiply that by the hydration percentage with a 0 and a dot in front of it, (0.93 in the above example), and you’ll get the right amount of water to use by weight. The same goes for salt: for 2% salt, just multiply the flour weight by 0.02, and for 2.5%, multiply the flour weight by 0.025, and so on.
The percentages that change from recipe to recipe are the water percentage (usually called hydration percentage), the amount of sourdough starter or leaven (usually calculated as a pre-fermented flour percentage), the salt, and any other ingredients.
The hydration percentage makes the biggest difference to the final bread and is often the first thing I glance at when I want to understand a bread recipe. The hydration percentage includes the water in the starter or pre- ferment, as well as the water added to the main dough.
Pre-fermented flour percentage
The percentage of pre-fermented flour (in the form of starter or leaven) will determine how rapidly the dough ferments, and this amount largely needs to be balanced with timing and temperature, and can be a changeable amount throughout the year, or can be changed around depending on how quickly (or slowly) you want to ferment your dough on a particular day. The pre-fermented flour is a part of the total flour that has already been calculated, rather than being extra flour that is added.
Salt percentage
The salt percentage is usually pretty consistent from recipe to recipe, except for specialty breads like Tuscan salt-free bread, and other breads that are baked with less (or more) salt on purpose. In some recipes (but not my ones), the percentage of salt will appear to be higher in recipes that use a larger amount of starter or leaven when the flour in the starter is there as a separate ingredient and is not included in the total flour percentage.
Bakers percentages for the cinnamon raison bread I shared here. The cinnamon amount is hard to measure by weight for small batches and is not included in these percentages, but you can see from the other percentages that to turn any bread recipe into a cinnamon raisin recipe, you can simply add 6% of the flour weight as honey, 19% of the flour weight as raisins, and replace some of the water with milk.
May your kitchen be filled with the smell of freshly baked bread. Floury regards, Kate
P.S. If you'd like to access an archive of all previous Floury Friday emails, simply visit http://katedownham.kit.com.
P.P.S. If you are enjoying these emails, please feel free to share the signup page with friends and family. Here’s the link: https://katedownham.kit.com/779eefc56e
Weekly sourdough recipes and tips from an experienced baker and homesteader, with a focus on 100% whole grains. Subscribe today to get a free eBook of sourdough discard recipes.
How steam works Baking from the baker’s perspective sometimes looks like one simple process - put the bread in the oven, and the bread bakes. For the bread, it is an entirely different matter, with two distinct stages of baking. During the first stage of baking, which lasts around twenty minutes, the bread hits the oven, and it continues to rise with very rapid yeast activity until the yeast dies off when the dough reaches around 60ºC (140ºF) During this oven spring stage it’s good to have...
All About Rye Sourdough bread made from 50% rye and 50% whole wheat. Rye is probably the most misunderstood grain. To begin with, much of the rye bread found for sale contains only a tiny amount of rye, and most of these loaves also contain caraway and molasses, so many people think that a rye bread tastes like a mixture of wheat, caraway and molasses, and don’t know what real rye tastes like. The misunderstanding further deepens when baking with rye – it just does not behave at all like...
How to swap white flour with whole grain flour in recipes I started baking whole grain bread in 2009. There wasn’t a whole lot of information out there back then. At first I diligently followed a recipe that was mostly white flour, with around 40% whole wheat flour, and made some OK bread, but after I while I wanted to get rid of the white flour completely. I quickly learned that replacing white flour with whole grain flour 1:1 does not yield great bread. Whole grain flours need more...
