Baker's percentage looks like maths homework and is actually the opposite: it's the trick that makes recipes stop being fixed instructions and start being adjustable formulas. Once it clicks, you'll never scale a recipe by multiplying cups again.
The one rule
Flour is always 100%. Everything else is a percentage of the flour weight, not of the total.
| Ingredient | Baker's % | At 1,000 g flour |
|---|---|---|
| Flour | 100% | 1,000 g |
| Water | 65% | 650 g |
| Salt | 2% | 20 g |
| Yeast (instant) | 1% | 10 g |
| Total | 168% | 1,680 g dough |
Yes, the percentages add to more than 100. That confuses everyone once and then never again. They're not shares of a whole — they're all ratios to the flour.
And backwards: ingredient weight = flour weight × (% ÷ 100)
Why it beats a normal recipe
Scaling is trivial. Want 40% more dough? Change the flour to 1,400 g and recalculate. Every ratio holds automatically. Compare that to scaling "3¼ cups flour and 1⅓ cups water" by 1.4.
Two recipes become comparable. One calls for 500 g flour and 325 g water; another for 800 g and 520 g. Are they the same bread? In percentages, both are 65% hydration — identical dough, different batch size. You'd never see that from the raw numbers.
You can work backwards from the output. This is the real payoff. Need six 250 g pizza bases? That's 1,500 g of dough. Divide by the total percentage (168%) to get your flour: 1,500 ÷ 1.68 ≈ 893 g. Now every other ingredient follows. Our pizza dough calculator does exactly this — you give it the number of pizzas and the ball weight, and it works back to the ingredients.
Typical percentages
| Ingredient | Usual range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Water | 55–100% | The defining variable |
| Salt | 1.8–2.2% | Narrow — this one really matters |
| Instant yeast | 0.5–1.5% | Lower for slow ferments |
| Oil / fat | 0–10% | Softens crumb |
| Sugar | 0–12% | Above ~10% slows yeast |
| Starter / preferment | 10–30% | See below |
Salt is the one to respect. The 1.8–2.2% window is tight because salt does more than season — it tightens gluten and controls fermentation speed. At 1% bread tastes flat and proofs too fast; at 3% the yeast struggles. This is why measuring salt by volume is a bad idea: coarse and fine salt have very different densities per spoon.
The starter trap
Here's what catches sourdough bakers. A starter is roughly half flour and half water — so the flour in your starter counts toward your total flour, and its water counts toward hydration.
Ignore that and your real hydration is meaningfully higher than the number you think you're baking at. This is why two people follow the same "75% hydration" recipe and get different doughs. The version that accounts for starter flour is called total formula hydration, and it's the honest number.
Weigh, don't scoop
Baker's percentage only works by weight, and that's a feature. A cup of flour varies by up to 20% depending on whether it was scooped or spooned, and whether it's settled. That's the difference between a workable dough and a brick.
Grams beat ounces here simply because the maths is easier — 65% of 1,000 is instant. A scale is the cheapest upgrade in baking.
For the pizza-specific side of this, see our guide to pizza dough hydration, which covers what the water percentage actually does to your crust.
Try the free calculator
Skip the manual math — get instant numbers for your own project:
Frequently Asked Questions
What is baker's percentage?
A system where flour is always 100% and every other ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the flour weight, which makes recipes easy to scale and compare.
Why do baker's percentages add up to more than 100?
Because they aren't shares of a whole — each is a ratio to the flour weight alone. A simple bread formula typically totals around 168%.
How do I scale a bread recipe using baker's percentage?
Change only the flour weight and recalculate every other ingredient from its percentage. To hit a target dough weight, divide it by the total percentage to find the flour.
How much salt should be in bread dough?
Between 1.8% and 2.2% of the flour weight. Salt controls fermentation speed and tightens gluten, so this range is much tighter than most other ingredients.