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.

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.

May your kitchen be filled with the smell of freshly baked bread. Floury regards,
​
Kate

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