Baker's Percentage Calculator (Hydration)
Calculate baker's percentages for bread dough — hydration, salt, yeast, and starter percentages relative to flour weight.
What this calculates
Serious baking uses baker's percentage: every ingredient expressed as a percent of total flour weight. Flour is always 100 %. This makes recipes scale perfectly and lets you compare doughs across different sizes. This calculator converts between weights and percentages, and scales a recipe to any target dough weight.
Formula & how it works
Each ingredient %= ingredient_weight ÷ flour_weight × 100. Flour is always 100 %. Hydration = water % (typical: 60 % rustic, 70-75 % artisan, 80+ % ciabatta/focaccia). Salt: 1.8-2.2 %. Yeast: 0.5-2 % fresh, 0.2-1 % instant. Sourdough starter: 15-25 %.
Worked example
500 g flour, 350 g water, 10 g salt, 5 g instant yeast. Hydration = 350/500 = 70 %. Salt = 10/500 = 2 %. Yeast = 5/500 = 1 %. To make 800 g of this dough at the same ratios: flour = 800 / (1 + 0.70 + 0.02 + 0.01) = 463 g. Water = 324 g. Salt = 9 g. Yeast = 4.6 g.
Frequently asked questions
Why does flour = 100 %?
Convention. Makes comparison between recipes trivial — a 75 % hydration sourdough vs an 80 % hydration ciabatta are directly comparable. Industrial bakeries and professional bakers use this exclusively.
What's a 'higher hydration' dough?
70 %+ water. Wetter, harder to handle, but more open crumb (bigger holes), better flavor development, longer fermentation tolerance. Beginner-friendly: 65-68 %. Artisan target: 75 %. Master-level: 85 %+.
Salt percentage?
1.8-2.2 % of flour weight. Less = bland and over-ferments. More = stops yeast and over-salty. Exception: pretzel dough goes even lower (1 %) since you'll top with coarse salt.
How does this differ from US volume recipes?
Cups of flour vary 20-30 % by how packed. Bakers measure by weight. A serious bread book or YouTube channel will give weight + percentages. Throwing out the measuring cups is the biggest single quality improvement most home bakers make.