Baker’s Percentage

You have a huge desire to bake bread. You’ve created sourdough starter, now you are looking through 1 millions recipes of bread on internet, and see most of them are using formulas with percentage. What is hidden behind the baker’s percentage and how to use it?

A good reason for using bakers percentage is to make life of a baker easier, because that way it is way easier to scale the formula of bread up and down for bigger or smaller amount of dough.

📌 In every recipe total weight of flour is always expressed as 100%.

Example

I want to bake small loaf of bread, with total amount of flour 300g and we see this formula:

• Flour 100%
• Water 75%
• Starter 20%
• Salt 2%

We have 300g flour , to recalculate bakers percentage, you’ll have to use formula #1

📌 Total weight of flour multiply (TWF) by required percentage(P%) and divide by 100%

(TWF x P%) : 100%

• Flour 300g
• Water 75% ( (300g x 75) : 100 = 225g
• Starter 60g
• Salt 6g

Now we know that for 300g flour, we will need 225g water, 60g starter and 6g salt.

If for example you want to bake 10 loaves of bread, 300g flour each. You’ll need:

300g x 10 = 3000g flour

• Flour 3000g
• Water 2250g
• Starter 600g
• Salt 60g

Now, if you have a recipe without percentage in it, but you want to make a bigger or smaller amount, and make sure you recalculate everything properly.

Example

• Flour 400g
• Water 250g
• Starter 88g
• Salt 8g

How to find percentage of each ingredient?

In this case you’ll need formula #2

📌 Multiply total Weight of the ingredients (W) by 100%, divide by Total Weight of Flour (TWF)

((W) x 100%) : TWF

In our example :

• Flour 400g 100%
• Water 250g (250 x 100) : 400 = 62.5%
• Starter 22%
• Salt 2%

Formula #2 showed us the percentages of all required ingredients

• Flour 100%
• water 62.5%
• starter 22%
• salt 2%

Seems pretty easy. Let me know what you think about baker’s percentage?