Baker's Percentage Calculator
Two-way baker's math: turn any bread recipe into baker's percentages (total flour = 100%), or scale any formula to your target flour or dough weight. Preferments (levain, poolish, biga) are split into flour + water automatically so you always see true hydration.
Recipe → baker's percentages
List every ingredient with its weight. Mark each row's kind: flour, liquid (water, milk, eggs), preferment (enter its hydration), or other (salt, sugar, fat, yeast). Total flour — including flour inside preferment — becomes 100%.
| Ingredient | Grams | Baker's % | Flour / water split |
|---|
Baker's % → recipe (scale a formula)
Enter your formula as percentages. Then scale by flour weight or by total dough weight. Convention: 100% = total flour (your flour rows plus the flour inside any preferment).
| Ingredient | % | Grams | Flour / water split |
|---|
Preferment quick reference
A preferment is flour + water (sometimes a pinch of yeast or mature starter) fermented before mixing the final dough. Enter it as one preferment row with its hydration and the calculator splits it automatically:
| Preferment | Typical hydration | 200 g contains |
|---|---|---|
| Liquid levain / poolish | 100% | 100 g flour + 100 g water |
| Stiff levain | 50–65% | 121–133 g flour + 67–79 g water |
| Biga | 50–60% | 125–133 g flour + 67–75 g water |
Stiff levain numbers: at 65% hydration, 200 g = 200/1.65 = 121.2 g flour + 78.8 g water; at 50%, 200/1.5 = 133.3 g flour + 66.7 g water. Biga at 55%: 200/1.55 = 129.0 g flour + 71.0 g water.
Worked examples
1. Recipe → %: country sourdough
900 g bread flour, 100 g whole wheat, 750 g water, 200 g levain (100% hydration), 20 g salt.
Total flour = 900 + 100 + 100 (flour inside the levain) = 1,100 g = 100%.
| Ingredient | Grams | Baker's % |
|---|---|---|
| Bread flour | 900 | 81.82% |
| Whole wheat | 100 | 9.09% |
| Water | 750 | 68.18% |
| Levain | 200 | 18.18% |
| Salt | 20 | 1.82% |
True hydration = (750 + 100) / 1,100 = 77.27% (nominal would be only 68.18%). Total dough = 1,970 g.
2. % → recipe by flour weight: Neapolitan pizza
Formula: '00' flour 100%, water 62%, salt 2.5%, instant dry yeast 0.3%. Flour weight 1,500 g.
| Ingredient | % | Grams |
|---|---|---|
| '00' flour | 100% | 1,500.0 |
| Water | 62% | 930.0 |
| Salt | 2.5% | 37.5 |
| Instant dry yeast | 0.3% | 4.5 |
Total dough = 2,472 g (about six 400 g pizza balls with a little extra).
3. % → recipe by dough weight: poolish baguette
Formula: bread flour 70%, water 50%, salt 2%, poolish 60% (100% hydration). Target dough 2,730 g.
Percentages sum to 182%, so flour = 2,730 / 1.82 = 1,500 g:
| Ingredient | % | Grams | Split |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bread flour | 70% | 1,050.0 | 1,050 g flour |
| Water | 50% | 750.0 | 750 g water |
| Salt | 2% | 30.0 | – |
| Poolish | 60% | 900.0 | 450 g flour + 450 g water |
Total dough = 1,050 + 750 + 30 + 900 = 2,730 g ✓. True hydration = (750 + 450) / (1,050 + 450) = 80.00%.
4. Why preferment hydration matters
Same visible recipe — 900 g flour, 650 g water, 200 g levain, 20 g salt (1,770 g dough) — but two levain hydrations:
| Levain 100% hydration | Levain 65% hydration | |
|---|---|---|
| Flour in levain | 100.0 g | 121.2 g |
| Water in levain | 100.0 g | 78.8 g |
| Total flour | 1,000.0 g | 1,021.2 g |
| True hydration | 75.00% | 71.36% |
The stiffer levain quietly drops true hydration by 3.6 points — enough to change dough handling. This is why "just add 200 g levain" is ambiguous without hydration.
Frequently asked questions
Baker's percentage expresses every ingredient as a percentage of the total flour weight, which is always 100%. Water at 65% means 65 g of water per 100 g of flour. Because flour is the fixed reference, any recipe becomes trivially scalable: multiply each percentage by your flour weight to get grams.
Add up all the flour in the recipe — including the flour hidden inside any preferment — that total is 100%. Divide each ingredient's weight by the total flour and multiply by 100. Example: 900 g bread flour + 100 g whole wheat + 200 g levain at 100% hydration contains 1,100 g total flour, so 750 g water is 68.18% and 20 g salt is 1.82%. The Recipe → % tab above does this automatically.
Nominal hydration only counts the water you pour in; true hydration counts ALL water (including water inside levain, poolish, or biga) divided by ALL flour (including preferment flour). Example: 750 g water + 200 g levain at 100% hydration on 1,100 g total flour gives 77.27% true hydration versus 68.18% nominal. True hydration is the honest number for comparing recipes.
Divide the target dough weight by the sum of all formula percentages (as a decimal). Flour weight = target dough / (sum of percentages / 100), then multiply each percentage by the flour weight. Example: a formula totalling 182% scaled to 2,730 g dough needs 1,500 g flour; water at 50% is 750 g and poolish at 60% is 900 g. Use the % → Recipe tab and choose "Total dough weight".
Split the preferment into flour and water using its hydration: flour = weight / (1 + hydration/100). So 200 g levain at 100% hydration contributes 100 g flour and 100 g water, while 200 g levain at 65% hydration contributes 121.2 g flour and 78.8 g water. Poolish is typically 100% hydration; biga is usually 50–60% hydration. Enter the preferment as one row and set its hydration — the calculator does the split.
Beginners do best at 60–65% (sandwich loaves, pizza), moving to 70–78% for open-crumb sourdough once shaping is comfortable. Higher hydration needs strong bread flour and confident handling. Enriched doughs like brioche are better judged by total liquid (eggs + milk + water), around 55–60% of flour weight.
The standard is 1.8–2.2% of flour weight — 20 g of salt per 1,000 g of flour is 2%. Below about 1.5% bread tastes bland; above 2.5% salt noticeably slows fermentation, so very salty formulas need a longer bulk ferment.
That is normal: flour alone is 100%, so a complete formula typically totals 160–185%. The check that matters is that flour plus the flour inside your preferment equals 100% — if it does not, either a flour is missing or the preferment percentage is written against the wrong base. The calculator shows this check under every result.
Related tools
- Dough Calculator — recipe-driven calculator for pizza, bread & sourdough: pick a style preset, set your ball count or flour weight, get exact grams (with true hydration, aliquot method, and starter feeding).
- Recipe Scaler — scale any cooking recipe up or down by servings or factor.
Scope note: the Dough Calculator works from fixed fields or its own percentage presets; this page is the free-form baker's-math workbench — convert your own ingredient lists to percentages and scale your own formulas by flour or dough weight.
Free tool by NRTechStudio