Baker's percentage is the system professional bakers use to write and scale recipes. Instead of listing ingredients as a share of the whole recipe, everything is measured against the flour weight, which stays fixed at 100% no matter how big or small the batch is.

Before you read on: guess the total dough weight

500g flour, 65% water, 2% salt, 1% yeast. What's the total dough weight?

The formula

Baker's percentage = (ingredient weight ÷ total flour weight) × 100. Flour itself is always 100%. So if a recipe uses 500g flour and 350g water, water is at 70%, which is the dough's hydration.

Why bakers use it

The system makes recipes trivially easy to scale. Double the flour weight and every other ingredient doubles with it, without needing to recalculate ratios from scratch. It also makes it easy to compare two recipes at a glance: a 65% hydration bread and a 78% hydration focaccia are instantly different in a way raw gram weights don't communicate as clearly.

Handling multiple flour types

When a recipe blends flours, say bread flour and whole wheat, add them together first. That combined weight is the 100% baseline, not each flour counted separately. 300g bread flour plus 200g whole wheat is 500g total flour, and every other ingredient is calculated against that 500g figure, not against either flour individually.

Worked examples

IngredientWeight%
Flour500g100%
Water325g65%
Salt10g2%
Yeast5g1%

Total dough weight: 840g (total percentage 168%)

Use the Baker's Percentage Calculator to build or check formulas like these with your own numbers.

Test your understanding

1. What percentage is flour always set to?

2. Flour 100%, water 70%, salt 2%, yeast 1%. What's the total percentage?

3. In the enriched dough example above, what's the total dough weight?

Frequently asked questions

Why is flour always 100% in baker's percentage?
Flour is the one ingredient present in essentially every dough formula, and it's usually the largest single ingredient by weight, which makes it a stable, universal reference point. Fixing it at 100% means every other ingredient can be expressed and compared against that same baseline, regardless of batch size.
Can I use baker's percentage for cakes and pastries, not just bread?
Yes, though it's most associated with bread and pizza dough where flour dominates the recipe. Enriched doughs, and even some cake and pastry formulas, can be expressed the same way: flour at 100%, with butter, sugar, eggs, and liquid stated as percentages of that flour weight.

How this is checked. The formula and worked examples above are cross-checked against multiple independent baking references, including trade-publication explanations of baker's percentage used in professional bakeries.

Sources