Category: Baking tips

  • Salt in Bread Dough: The Smallest Number With the Biggest Job

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    Salt in Bread Dough: The Smallest Number With the Biggest Job

    It’s only about 2% of the recipe. It still decides how your dough rises, feels and tastes.

    Before my pizzaiolo training, I made dough with too little salt and dough with too much. Not on purpose, and not as some bold experiment. I simply didn’t know exactly how much belonged in there, or why. Salt looks like the least interesting ingredient on the list: a few grams next to kilos of flour and water. That’s exactly why it’s so easy to get wrong.

    It was only during the course that someone explained what salt actually does in dough, and why the number sits where it does. This post is that explanation, plus a few times salt (and its sneakier cousins) caught me out even after I’d learned better.

    How much salt? The numbers

    Like every other ingredient, salt is a percentage of the flour weight (if that’s new, start with Baker’s Percentages Explained). For most bread, the standard is about 1.8 to 2%. Pizza dough usually runs a little higher, somewhere between 2 and 3% depending on the style, with Neapolitan recipes at the upper end. In my own training, the range we were taught was 2 to 2.5%.

    Salt (% of flour)On 1000g (35oz) flourWhere you’ll typically see it
    1.8%18g (0.6oz)Bread, low end of normal
    2%20g (0.7oz)Bread standard, and my own pizza dough
    2.5%25g (0.9oz)Pizza, the saltier side of what I was taught
    3%30g (1.1oz)Some Neapolitan-style recipes

    Notice how small the gaps look. Half a percent is just 5g (a fraction under 0.2oz) on a kilo of flour, barely a pinch between your fingers. But that small difference is enough to change how the dough behaves.

    Salt slows yeast down. It doesn’t kill it.

    You’ll often hear that salt and yeast must never touch, because salt “kills” yeast. It’s one of the most repeated bits of baking folklore, and at normal amounts it isn’t true.

    What really happens is osmosis. Salt draws water out of the yeast cells, which stresses them and puts them into a short lag phase. Then they recover and carry on producing the carbon dioxide that makes dough rise. At the roughly 2% used in a recipe, the exposure is far too mild and too brief to do any lasting harm. King Arthur Baking puts it plainly: in any normal, practical baking scenario, letting yeast and salt touch won’t kill the yeast.

    The effect that does remain is a useful one. Salt keeps fermentation at a steady, controlled pace instead of letting the yeast race ahead. A slower fermentation gives flavor more time to develop, and it makes your timing far easier to predict.

    What else salt does for your dough

    Salt also tightens the gluten network, so the dough holds on to the gas the yeast produces. Without it, dough turns slack and sticky and is harder to shape. It’s what makes bread taste like bread, too: unsalted loaves come out flat, and nothing else in the recipe can make up for that. On top of that it helps the crust brown, a smaller effect, but it adds to the color you’re after.

    Too little, too much, or too late

    With too little salt, the dough feels slack, it ferments quicker than you planned, and the result tastes flat. With too much, fermentation slows down, the loaf ends up with less volume, and it simply tastes salty. Both are easy to do when you work by feel, because 5g in either direction looks like nothing in the bowl.

    Knowing all this didn’t make me immune to forgetting it. More than once, while making pizza dough for an assignment, I was almost done mixing when I noticed a little bowl of pre-weighed salt still sitting on the table. One time I simply started over. Another time I added the salt at the very end and mixed the dough a little longer to work it in. That dough came out fine in the end.

    Tip: weigh your salt in grams, and put it straight into the bowl as soon as it’s on the scale, so there’s no separate little bowl left on the table to forget. A teaspoon of coarse salt and a teaspoon of fine salt don’t weigh the same either, so measuring by volume quietly changes your percentage. I always used plain fine table salt, and that kept the number the same from batch to batch.

    A quick word about sugar

    Salt isn’t the only small ingredient that can catch you out. Sugar is another one. A little sugar is perfectly normal in bread dough, where it helps the crust color at oven temperatures around 200°C (390°F). In a pizza oven that runs twice as hot, that same sugar makes the crust brown, and then burn, long before the pizza is ready. I learned that one the hard way, and I’ll tell the full story in a future post about baking at pizza-oven temperatures.

    For now, the lesson is simple: know what’s in your dough before it goes in the oven. A formula written in baker’s percentages shows you at a glance what’s in there, salt and sugar included.

    Pick a number and stay with it

    The most useful advice from my training wasn’t a specific percentage. It was to choose one and stay with it. If your salt percentage moves around from batch to batch, you can’t tell whether a difference in your dough came from the salt, the water or the flour. Keep it fixed, and you can change one thing at a time and actually learn from the result. I settled on 2% for my pizza dough, and it has been my fixed point ever since.

    You don’t need to do the math by hand. Put your flour weight into the Baker Calculator, enter your salt in grams, and it shows you the percentage straight away. And because salt slows fermentation, it also affects your schedule, which is worth remembering when you plan with the Bake Planner.

    Salt doesn’t kill yeast, and it’s indispensable in your dough.

    — Rob

  • Sourdough Hydration: The Percentage Your Starter Is Hiding From You

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    Sourdough Hydration: The Percentage Your Starter Is Hiding From You

    Your recipe says 75%. Your starter has other plans.

    While researching this one, I worked through a stack of bread books written by professional bakers — the kind of thick, serious reference books people keep on a kitchen shelf for years. Almost none of them explain baker’s percentages. What you get instead is a recipe for one loaf: a list of ingredients, a list of weights, done. For a sourdough loaf, that usually reads as something like “200g of starter” and nothing more.

    One book did better than the rest — it gave a hydration percentage that actually included the water sitting inside the starter, not just the water added separately. That’s more than most manage. But it was still built around one specific loaf, at one specific size. Which is fine, right up until you want to bake two loaves instead of one, or a bigger batch, or swap in a different flour — at which point a fixed recipe stops being useful and you’re back to guessing.

    Your starter isn’t one ingredient. It’s two.

    Baker’s percentages work on a simple rule: flour is 100%, and everything else — water, salt, whatever else is in the bowl — is a percentage of that. I got into the basics of this in Baker’s Percentages Explained. The rule holds for sourdough too, with one catch people miss constantly: your starter is not a single mystery ingredient. It’s flour and water that have already been mixed together, and both of those need to be counted in your totals — not set aside as if the starter doesn’t count.

    A starter kept at 100% hydration is exactly half flour, half water by weight. So 200g (7oz) of that starter isn’t “200g of starter” for hydration purposes — it’s 100g (3.5oz) of flour and 100g (3.5oz) of water, and both amounts belong in your running totals alongside everything else you’re adding to the bowl.

    Where this quietly goes wrong

    Say you’re aiming for a 900g (2 lb) dough at 75% hydration, using a 200g (7oz) starter at 100% hydration. Total flour needs to land at 900g, so with 100g of that already coming from the starter, you add 800g (28oz) separately. Total water needs to be 75% of 900g, which is 675g — but 100g of that is already sitting in the starter, so you only add 575g (20oz) of water on top.

    Skip that step, and it’s an easy trap to fall into: add 800g of flour, then add 675g of water because that’s what “75%” told you to add, forgetting the starter is already carrying 100g of each. Add up the real totals and you’ve built a dough at roughly 86% hydration — noticeably wetter than planned, and stickier than your hands were expecting.

    Tip: this changes again if your starter isn’t kept at 100% hydration. A stiffer starter (say, 50%) carries more flour than water for the same weight, so a recipe written around a 100% starter won’t behave the same way if you feed yours differently. If you keep a non-standard starter, that’s one more reason to work in percentages rather than copying someone else’s fixed weights.

    Why this matters more once you scale

    A fixed, one-loaf recipe hides this problem reasonably well, because someone already did the arithmetic for you, once, for that one size. The moment you want a second loaf, or a different size entirely, you’re not scaling a recipe anymore — you’re scaling ratios, and the starter’s hidden flour and water have to scale right along with everything else. I got into the wider version of this problem in Scaling Recipes Without Losing Your Mind (or Your Ratios).

    One honest disclaimer

    Sourdough isn’t something I bake regularly myself — it came up briefly in the theory portion of my pizzaiolo training and not much beyond that. What’s above comes from working through the books and getting the arithmetic straight, not from years of feeding a starter. If you do keep one, you already know more about how yours behaves than any general rule can tell you — the math above is the part that’s easy to get wrong regardless of experience, not a substitute for it.

    Once you’ve folded your starter’s hidden flour and water into the totals — the way we just did above — the rest is just baker’s percentages, same as any other dough. Run those adjusted numbers through our baker’s percentage calculator and you’re back on solid, predictable ground, no matter how many loaves you’re scaling to.

    — Rob

  • Baker’s Percentages: The One Baking “Rule” That Actually Makes Sense

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    Baker’s Percentages: The One Baking “Rule” That Actually Makes Sense

    Flour is always 100%. Everything else is just a percentage of that: the one “rule” that sounds harder than it actually is.

    Ask a home baker what scares them off a “real” recipe, and most won’t say kneading, or proofing, or even sourdough starters. They’ll say percentages. Numbers next to ingredients instead of cups and spoons, as if baking bread suddenly demands a maths degree.

    It doesn’t. Once it clicks, baker’s percentages are the easiest thing about baking. Easier than judging whether dough has “doubled in size.” Easier than converting cups to grams. You just have to see the trick once. So let’s see it.

    Flour is always 100%

    Here’s the whole rule: flour is always 100%, and every other ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the flour weight, not of the total dough, just the flour.

    That’s it. That’s the rule bakers make sound complicated.

    Say a recipe uses 1000g of flour and 700g of water. Water isn’t “70% of the dough.” It’s 70% of the flour. Add 20g of salt, and salt is 2%. Add 3g of instant yeast, and that’s 0.3%. Nobody’s dividing by the total weight of everything in the bowl. Everything is just compared back to one number: the flour.

    IngredientWeightBaker’s %
    Flour1000g100%
    Water700g70%
    Salt20g2%
    Yeast3g0.3%

    Once you see it laid out like that, the “intimidating” recipe with all its percentages is really just a recipe that tells you exactly what it’s doing, instead of hiding behind “1 cup of this, a pinch of that.”

    Where it actually clicked

    For a while, I assumed the percentages had to add up to 100%, like a pie chart: flour, water, salt, yeast, all sharing one pot. During training, it turned out that’s not how it works at all. Every ingredient is compared to the flour, and only the flour. Add them all up and you’ll usually land somewhere north of 100%, and that’s fine, because the total was never the point. The question was always: how much of this, compared to how much flour?

    The ingredient that trips people up first is water, mostly because we’re used to measuring liquids in litres, not grams.

    Small aside: a litre of water weighs the same on your scale whether you’re at sea level or halfway up a mountain — that part never changes. What does change at altitude is how it behaves in the oven: lower air pressure means water boils at a lower temperature, so dough ferments and bakes differently the higher up you go. A pressure cooker does the same trick in reverse. Trap the steam, raise the pressure, and water boils hotter instead of cooler, which is why it cooks food faster. Same principle, opposite direction.

    Why this beats guessing

    Before any of this clicked, I’d bake batches of wildly different sizes: twenty dough balls for a weekend, six just to test a new flour, thirty for a bigger job. Every single time, the dough came out just a little different. Not ruined, just… not quite the same as last time. I put it down to feel, to the weather, to just being an inconsistent baker.

    If pizza is your thing, the Pizza Dough Calculator does exactly this backward math: number of balls in, exact grams out.

    It wasn’t any of that. It was that I was scaling by guesswork instead of by percentage. The moment you work in baker’s percentages, batch size stops mattering: 20 balls or 6 or 30, the ratios stay identical, so the dough does too. That’s the real payoff — not the maths itself, but what it lets you do.

    With percentages, you can take a recipe you love at 1000g of flour and make it work at 250g or at 10kg, without touching the ratios. You can compare two completely different recipes at a glance, a 60% hydration loaf and a 75% hydration ciabatta, and know instantly which one will feel stiffer in your hands before you’ve even mixed either. And when something goes wrong, percentages tell you what went wrong: too little salt, too much water, not enough yeast, rather than a vague “I don’t know, I just followed the recipe.”

    It’s also why professional bakeries never measure in cups. Volume is inconsistent: a “cup of flour” can vary by dozens of grams depending on how it’s scooped. Weight, expressed as a percentage of flour, is the same recipe every single time, whether you’re making one loaf or two hundred, bread dough or pizza dough.

    Try it yourself

    You don’t need to do any of this math by hand. Plug your own numbers into the Baker Calculator and watch the percentages update as you adjust ingredients: the same 1000g / 700g / 20g / 3g example from earlier, or your own recipe.

    And once percentages make sense, a few things get a lot easier: figuring out what hydration to aim for depending on the bread you’re making, scaling a recipe up or down without losing your mind, and working out when to start that dough so it’s ready exactly when you need it.

    Once this rule clicks, you stop measuring dough and start reading it. Next up: the smallest number in the recipe, and the one that does more work than you’d think. Read about salt in bread dough.

    — Rob

  • When Should You Start That Dough? The Bake Planner Does the Fermentation Math for You

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    When Should You Start That Dough? The Bake Planner Does the Fermentation Math for You

    A free tool that works backward from your deadline, or forward from right now, so you’re not doing fermentation math on the back of a flour bag.

    A while back I was planning a pizza night for a group big enough to need 24 dough balls. Not a professional job, just an ambitious weekend, and these days a fairly rare one for me. I haven’t worked regularly as a pizzaiolo in a while, so I’m a bit out of rhythm with the pace real volume demands. I sat down to work out when to start the dough so everything would be ready by eight, and it turned into more arithmetic than I expected: bulk rise, balling, a cold rest in the fridge, coming back to room temperature, then the actual baking, and that last part multiplied by however many pizzas my oven could hold at once.

    I got there eventually, on paper, with a few crossings-out. The evening went well in the end — but if I’m honest, it wasn’t just the arithmetic that saved it. It was also falling back on old habits from my training: a feel for when dough is actually ready that no formula fully replaces, and enough experience to sense when a number on paper needed a second look. That’s the part that bothered me afterward. Someone without that background, facing the exact same 24-pizza evening, wouldn’t have that instinct to lean on when the numbers got complicated. That’s exactly who I built this for.

    So I built the tool I was missing

    The Bake Planner is a free tool (a bulk fermentation calculator, really, though it covers the full schedule rather than just that one stage) that does that timing math for you, for both bread and pizza. You can ask it two different questions, depending on what you actually know at the moment:

    “I want to be done by a certain time: tell me when to start.” Or the other way around: “I’m starting right now: tell me when I’ll be done.” Either way, it walks the whole process forward or backward and hands you a clock time for every stage, not just a total duration.

    Your kitchen isn’t a lab, so the tool doesn’t assume it is

    Rise time is famously temperature-sensitive, and most timelines you find online quietly assume a kitchen that doesn’t exist — a fixed 21°C, every time. The Bake Planner asks for your actual room temperature and adjusts from there, using the rule of thumb that rise time roughly doubles for every 10°C you drop.

    Tip: planning a long, cold rest in the fridge? Use chilled water when you mix, not straight from the tap. Room-temperature water can push your final dough temperature up before the fridge ever gets a chance to slow things down, and cooler dough at the mixing stage also helps gluten development. Worth checking, too: an older fridge often runs warmer than its dial claims, since cooling capacity fades with age. A cheap fridge thermometer beats a guess every time. A thermometer doesn’t lie.

    The part that actually started this: batch size and oven capacity

    That 24-pizza evening is exactly why the Bake Planner asks how many loaves or pizzas you’re making, and how many your oven fits per bake. I had two ovens going that night, one pizza at a time in each, so two pizzas per bake, not twenty-four. Twenty-four pizzas at that capacity is twelve sequential bakes, and that adds up to real time most timelines never account for. The same math applies to bread: twenty loaves with room for four at a time isn’t one bake either, it’s five. The tool does that multiplication for you and shows it plainly in the schedule, instead of leaving you to discover it the way I did, mid-evening, with a countertop full of dough.

    And the flour question follows you here too

    Long, slow rises (the kind that go 8 hours or more, often in the fridge) need flour strong enough to hold up over that stretch, the same theme I got into in Pizza Dough or Bread Dough?. So whenever you plan a rise that long, the Bake Planner asks about your flour: a W-value if you’re working with Italian flour, or just the protein percentage off any nutrition label if you’re not, since (as I got into in Flour Power) not every country prints a W-value on the bag. Either way, it tells you plainly whether what’s in your cupboard can actually carry the schedule you’ve just built.

    One honest disclaimer

    None of this makes the Bake Planner an exact science. It’s a good indication of when to start or when you’ll be done, not a guarantee — your kitchen, your flour, and your oven all have the final word. If you’re a newer baker with ambitious plans, build in some extra margin rather than cutting it close. Something will eventually go differently than planned; that part is going to happen to you regardless of how carefully you calculate. But everything you can plan for with room to spare should stay enjoyable, because that’s what makes baking worth doing in the first place, that, and the good bread and pizza everyone gets to eat afterward.

    Run a baking blog or site of your own? The Bake Planner is also available as a free embed, so you can drop the whole tool straight into your own page for your readers to use, no coding needed on your end. Get in touch and I’ll send over the code.

    It’s free, it’s on the site now, and it’s already saved me from doing that 24-pizza arithmetic by hand a second time.

    — Rob

  • Scaling Recipes Without Losing Your Mind (or Your Ratios)

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    Scaling Recipes Without Losing Your Mind (or Your Ratios)

    Doubling a recipe shouldn’t mean doing fraction math at 11pm. Here’s the easier way.

    I used to dread scaling recipes. A recipe written as “2 cups flour, 1¼ cups water, ¾ teaspoon salt” is annoying enough to follow once. Try tripling it for a weekend of baking for friends, and suddenly you’re doing fraction arithmetic with flour on your hands, hoping you didn’t just forget the salt entirely.

    Baker’s percentages fix this, and once it clicks, you’ll wonder why every recipe isn’t written this way.

    The trick is that flour never changes

    In baker’s percentages, flour is always 100%. That’s the whole foundation. Every other ingredient is expressed as a percentage of that flour weight, not as a fixed cup or spoon measurement. Water at 65% just means “65 grams of water for every 100 grams of flour,” no matter how much flour you’re actually using.

    That one shift changes everything about scaling. You’re no longer multiplying awkward fractions. You’re just picking a new flour weight and applying the same percentages you already had.

    Scaling up, worked example

    Take the default recipe you’ll see if you open the calculator right now: 1000g flour, 650g water (65%), 20g salt (2%), 7g yeast (0.7%), 30g oil (3%). Say you need three times as much for a bigger bake.

    Ingredient%Original× 3
    Flour100%1000g3000g
    Water65%650g1950g
    Salt2%20g60g
    Yeast0.7%7g21g
    Oil3%30g90g

    No fractions, no guessing whether you scaled the salt correctly. Just the same percentages, multiplied straight through. On the calculator, water already does this for you automatically: type in a new flour weight and the water updates to match your hydration slider. For the rest (salt, yeast, oil) the math is the same multiplication, just done by hand for now.

    The trickier direction: working backward from a target weight

    Here’s the one that trips people up, and the one I actually use most as a pizzaiolo: sometimes you don’t start with “how much flour do I have.” You start with “I need exactly 800 grams of dough for this pan” or “I want six 250-gram pizza balls.” You know the total weight you need, and you have to work backward to figure out the flour.

    I learned this one the annoying way: eyeballing flour amounts for a catering job until the dough balls came out wildly inconsistent. Once I started working backward from the target weight properly, every ball came out within a few grams of the last.

    The trick: add up all your percentages first, including flour’s own 100%. For our example recipe, that’s 100 + 65 + 2 + 0.7 + 3 = 170.7%. That number represents your total dough as a percentage. To find the flour weight for a specific total dough weight, divide your target by that number (as a decimal):

    Flour weight = Target dough weight ÷ (Total % ÷ 100)

    For 800g of finished dough: 800 ÷ 1.707 ≈ 469g of flour. Then apply the same percentages as before: 65% water is about 305g, 2% salt is about 9g, and so on, and you land almost exactly on your 800g target.

    This is the calculation I actually reach for more than any other, so here’s the one closer to home: say you’re making pizza for friends this weekend: six pizzas, each needing a 250g dough ball. That’s a target of 1500g total. (If you’d rather skip the manual math for pizza specifically, our pizza dough calculator does exactly this for you. Same principle, pizza-specific presets.)

    Ingredient%For 1500g dough
    Flour100%≈ 879g
    Water65%≈ 571g
    Salt2%≈ 18g
    Yeast0.7%≈ 6g
    Oil3%≈ 26g

    Mix, divide into six 250g balls, and you’re done. No leftover scraps of dough, no coming up short on the sixth ball because you eyeballed it. Same formula every time: total weight, divided by your total percentage, gives you the flour, and everything else follows from there.

    Save the version you land on

    Once you’ve scaled a recipe to the exact flour weight you need, save it to your library rather than redoing the math next time. Future-you, staring down another catering order at 11pm, will be grateful you did.

    — Rob

    Curious where these numbers come from in the first place? I wrote about my pizzaiolo training and the lessons that shaped how I bake.

  • Pizza Dough or Bread Dough? Why Your Flour Decides More Than Your Recipe Does

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    Pizza Dough or Bread Dough? Why Your Flour Decides More Than Your Recipe Does

    A 67% hydration pizza recipe that also makes a very good loaf of bread, and why that only works with the right flour.

    For years I kept my own pizza dough recipe at 67% hydration. That’s what I settled on through training and trial and error, and it’s what I still reach for most weekends. At some point, more or less by accident, I used the same dough to bake a loaf of bread instead of shaping it into rounds. It worked. Not “edible, if you squint” worked — genuinely good bread, with a proper open crumb. What came out of the oven was, essentially, a ciabatta.

    That shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did. But it took me a while to figure out why it worked at all.

    Tip: got a few pizza dough balls left over at the end of a session? Shape and bake them off as ciabatta. They’re perfect as a closing bite with drinks, or saved for the next day.

    The percentage never lied, the flour did

    My first assumption was the obvious one: pizza dough and bread dough are just different things, built for different hydration ranges, and what happened with that 67% dough was a lucky exception. That assumption didn’t survive contact with a second experiment.

    I tried the exact same recipe again, same percentages, same method, except this time with ordinary supermarket wheat flour instead of what I’d used before. The dough never came together properly. It stayed wet, slack, impossible to shape. Same numbers on paper, completely different dough in my hands.

    The recipe hadn’t changed. The flour had. That was the actual variable all along — not whether I was calling it pizza or calling it bread.

    What made the difference

    The flour behind that original 67% dough was Pinsa Romana, a patented Italian flour blend built specifically to handle high hydration. It mixes wheat flour, rice flour, and soy flour with a touch of dried sourdough, and the combination lets the dough hold onto far more water than a standard flour can, while staying light and easy to work with.

    I’m not going to get into the full story of Pinsa Romana here. It deserves its own post, and it’s getting one. For now, the relevant point is narrower: that flour is engineered to absorb water most flours simply can’t.

    Why the same recipe failed with supermarket flour

    Which is exactly what I ran into. Standard wheat flour from the supermarket doesn’t have anywhere near the same water-holding capacity. Push it to 67% hydration and it doesn’t turn into a lighter, airier dough. It just stays too wet, because the flour can’t absorb what the recipe is asking of it.

    So the recipe wasn’t wrong. It was just written for a flour that could carry it, and I’d swapped in a flour that couldn’t.

    Strength decides your ceiling, not a chart

    This connects directly to something I wrote about in Flour Power: A World Tour of the Bag You Reach For Every Day: 00, T55, Type 550 and a plain protein percentage are all measuring different things, and none of them hand you a ready-made answer for how much water your dough can take. That was deliberate. There isn’t a universal chart that says “this flour, this hydration.” Strength is something you find out by working with the dough in front of you, not something you look up.

    My Pinsa Romana dough and my supermarket-flour dough prove the same point from opposite directions: the ceiling on hydration is set by the flour’s strength, not by whether what you’re making is called pizza or bread. If you want a deeper technical breakdown of the baker’s percentage math itself, Weekend Bakery has a genuinely excellent explanation of it, and it’s well worth the read if you want the full picture behind these numbers.

    Why I built two different starting points

    This is also why Baker Calculator’s pizza dough recipe sits at a deliberately modest 54% hydration, built around an ordinary, medium-strong Tipo 00. It’s a flour nearly anyone can buy, and a hydration it can handle without complaint. It’s not the most exciting number I could have chosen. It’s the one that works reliably on the first try, regardless of which bag of flour you’re holding.

    From there, it’s on you to find your own ceiling, the same way I found mine. Use a stronger flour, push the hydration up in small steps, and pay attention to how the dough behaves at each stage rather than chasing a percentage for its own sake. That’s where a dough like my 67% Pinsa Romana version comes from: not a formula, but testing what a specific flour could actually carry.

    More on Pinsa Romana itself soon. There’s a lot more to that flour than fits here.

    — Rob

  • Flour Power: A World Tour of the Bag You Reach For Every Day

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    Flour Power: A World Tour of the Bag You Reach For Every Day

    Flour isn’t flour isn’t flour. Here’s what those numbers on the bag actually mean, and why they don’t mean what most people think.

    Every country seems to have invented its own way of labeling flour, and none of them agree with each other. Italian “00,” French “T55,” German “Type 550,” a bag from the supermarket that just says “all-purpose” — they can all be, more or less, the same flour wearing a different passport. Or they can be completely different animals. The only way to know is to understand what each system is actually measuring.

    That’s the part that trips people up, so let’s start there.

    These numbers aren’t all measuring the same thing

    This is the single most common misunderstanding I run into: people assume a French T65 or German Type 1050 tells you how strong the flour is: how much gluten it can develop, how much water it can hold. It doesn’t. Those numbers measure ash content: literally, how much mineral residue is left over when a lab burns a sample of the flour. More bran in the mix means more minerals, means a higher number.

    You can have a T55 at 10% protein and a T55 at 13% protein from two different mills. The number tells you about the bran, not the gluten. I learned this the hard way, swapping in a “similar-numbered” flour for a recipe and getting a completely different dough.

    Italy’s system works differently again: 00, 0, 1, 2, and Integrale describe how finely and how thoroughly the bran and germ have been sifted out, not ash content directly, though the two tend to move together. And the Netherlands, US, and UK skip type numbers almost entirely and just print the protein percentage on the bag, which is closer to what most home bakers actually want to know.

    Three different questions, three different answers. None of them wrong — just not interchangeable.

    Italy: refinement, not protein

    The Italian system (00, 0, 1, 2, Integrale) is about how much of the whole grain stays in the bag. “00” is the most refined: fine, white, almost entirely the starchy endosperm, no bran or germ to speak of. It’s what most pizzerias reach for, including the training I did myself. “Integrale” is the other end: full wholemeal, everything left in. The numbers in between are steps along that same road.

    What trips people up: 00 doesn’t automatically mean weak, and it doesn’t automatically mean strong. Italian mills sell 00 flour at a whole range of protein levels: a soft 00 for cakes and a strong 00 built for 24-hour pizza dough are both technically “00.” Always check the protein percentage on the bag itself, not just the type.

    France: T45 through T150

    T45 is the palest, finest, lowest-ash flour, built for pastry and enriched, buttery doughs, not for a chewy sourdough. T55 is the everyday workhorse, roughly what a good all-purpose flour gives you, and the base for a classic baguette. T65 is the one most French country-style sourdough (pain de campagne) is built on. A bit more bran, a bit more flavor, still very manageable. T80, T110, and T150 climb steadily toward full wholemeal.

    Germany, Austria, Switzerland: Type 405 to Type 1600

    Same idea as France, same ash-content logic, just with numbers roughly ten times larger. A French T55 and a German Type 550 are, in practice, close cousins. Type 405 is the fine, low-ash flour for cakes and pastries. Type 550 is the standard bread flour. Type 1050 and up move into darker, more rustic, more mineral-rich territory, with Type 1600 landing at essentially whole wheat.

    A rough translation table

    None of these line up perfectly (ash content and refinement aren’t measuring identical things), but if you need a reasonable substitute for your everyday baking flour, this is the neighborhood to look in:

    Everyday white / bread flourPastry / cake flourRustic / high-extraction
    Italy: 00 or 0Italy: 00 (soft wheat)Italy: 1, 2, Integrale
    France: T55France: T45France: T80–T150
    Germany: Type 550Germany: Type 405Germany: Type 1050–1600
    NL / US / UK: ~11–12% proteinNL / US / UK: ~8–9% proteinNL / US / UK: “whole wheat”

    Rye and spelt play by their own rules

    Worth a quick, separate mention: rye and spelt aren’t just “different wheat.” Rye develops very little of the gluten structure wheat does, absorbs water differently, and behaves nothing like a wheat dough even at matching hydration. Rye is a classic in Northern and Eastern European baking, and worth its own deep dive another time. Spelt, an ancient relative of modern wheat, has a more fragile gluten structure that tears more easily but ferments beautifully. Neither one substitutes 1:1 for wheat flour without adjustment.

    Whatever’s in your bag, the flour type field on the calculator is there so you can note exactly what you used (Type 550, T65, 00, or something with a name I’ve never heard of) right alongside the recipe. Six months from now, when the loaf turns out perfectly, you’ll actually know why.

    — Rob

  • Hydration by Bread Type: A Quick Reference

    Knead to Know

    Hydration by Bread Type: A Quick Reference

    The question I get asked more than any other: “what hydration should I use for X?” Here’s my go-to answer.

    If there’s one question that comes up more than anything else (from friends, from people at the market, from the comments under just about every bread photo I post), it’s this: “What hydration did you use for that?”

    There’s no single right answer, because it depends on the bread. A bagel and a ciabatta are both technically “dough,” but they behave nothing alike, and that’s almost entirely down to how much water is in them. So here’s the reference table I wish someone had handed me years ago: the range I actually start from for each type, before adjusting for my own flour and kitchen.

    Bread typeTypical hydrationWhat you get
    Bagels50–58%Dense, chewy, holds its shape through boiling
    Soft pretzels50–55%Firm enough to shape and twist without collapsing
    Sandwich / pan loaf60–65%Even, tight crumb, easy to slice
    Pizza dough60–65%Workable by hand, still stretches thin without tearing
    Baguette65–70%Open-ish crumb, crisp crust, still shapeable
    Sourdough country loaf70–75%Balance of open crumb and a dough you can still handle
    Focaccia75–85%Soft, dimpled, almost pours into the pan
    Ciabatta75–85%Big irregular holes, thin crisp crust

    These are starting ranges, not rules carved in stone. Treat them as where to begin, not where you have to land.

    Your flour moves the range

    I wrote about this in more detail on the calculator page itself, but it’s worth repeating here: these percentages assume a reasonably standard flour. A weak, low-protein flour will struggle to hold the top end of any of these ranges: you’ll end up with a puddle, not a dough. A strong bread flour can often go higher than the range suggests. The table gets you in the right neighborhood; your own flour decides how far you can push it.

    Hydration isn’t the whole story — watch your dough temperature too

    Get the hydration right and your dough can still fight you if the temperature is off. The percentage in the table above tells you how much water to use. It says nothing about how warm that water should be, and that turns out to matter just as much.

    Every time you mix dough, by hand or in a machine, you add heat to it through friction. The more vigorously you mix, and the longer it takes, the warmer your dough ends up, regardless of what temperature the water started at. It’s your final dough temperature, not your water temperature, that actually drives how the dough ferments.

    I remember checking mine with a probe thermometer straight out of the mixer the first time: 30°C (86°F). Fine to eat, but far too warm for a controlled rise — everything happens too fast and too unevenly.

    The fix is entirely in your hands, literally. Adjust the temperature of the water you mix with, not the recipe. If your dough keeps coming out too warm, cool the water down; a can of water left in the fridge is often enough. Mix again, check the final dough temperature, and take note. Over a few attempts you’ll find the water temperature that gets your dough where you want it, for your specific mixing method and time. Mine landed around 6°C (43°F) water for a 23°C (73°F) finished dough, mixing by hand for about ten minutes. Yours will likely be different, since it depends on your kitchen, your mixer or your hands, and how long you knead.

    This is exactly what the notes field on the calculator is for. Once you’ve found the water temperature and mixing time that work for you, write it down next to the recipe (“water at 6°C (43°F), hand-mixed 10 minutes”) so next time you don’t have to rediscover it from scratch.

    If you’re moving up the table

    Say your usual sandwich loaf sits at 62% and you want to try your hand at ciabatta. Don’t jump straight to 80%. Increase in small steps of 2–3% at a time, bake, see how the dough behaved, and adjust again. It’s slower than just guessing, but it’s the difference between a dough you can actually shape and one that ends up as a sticky mess on your counter.

    Whatever you’re making, plug your flour weight into the calculator, drag the hydration slider to your target, and let it work out the water for you. If it turns out well, or if it doesn’t, the notes field is there so you remember what you actually did next time.

    — Rob


    I go into more of the “why” behind this (the training, the theory) in an earlier post.

  • What My Pizzaiolo Training Taught Me About Dough Hydration

    From the Bench

    What My Pizzaiolo Training Taught Me About Dough Hydration

    A few things I picked up during six months of theory and practice, and still think about every time I mix a batch.

    Before Baker Calculator existed, it existed as a notebook. Before that, it existed as roughly six months of Tuesday evenings: one day a week, half theory and half hands in the dough, at a temporary S.N.I.P. affiliate location that was running in Utrecht, the Netherlands at the time. The weeks weren’t always back-to-back; a few got skipped and pushed. It ended, half a year later, with a proper exam, theory and practice both. That’s where I trained as a pizzaiolo, and it’s where most of what this calculator is built on actually comes from.

    Today, S.N.I.P. runs its main courses in Italy, and has affiliate locations in a number of other countries, though as far as I know, there isn’t currently an official location in the Netherlands. If you’re curious, their course finder is the best way to check what’s running near you.

    I want to share a few of the lessons that stuck with me the longest from those six months. Not the fancy ones, the practical ones. The kind you only really understand once your hands are in the dough.

    Dough isn’t one thing — it’s three

    One of the first things we covered in theory was that “making dough” isn’t a single method. There’s direct dough (impasto diretto), where everything goes in together and ferments in one go: fast, straightforward, forgiving. There’s semi-direct dough, which uses a small pre-fermented portion to build flavor before the main mix. And there’s indirect dough, where a portion ferments separately, sometimes for many hours, before joining the rest.

    Nobody tells you this as a home baker, and it’s genuinely useful to know: the “best” dough isn’t one of these three. It depends entirely on your timeline, your flour, and what texture you’re after. I still default to a simple direct dough on a weeknight, and save the longer indirect methods for weekends when I actually have time to enjoy the process.

    Water temperature matters more than the recipe admits

    A big chunk of our theory hours went into something most recipes skip entirely: calculating and managing water temperature. Not “cold water” or “room temperature water”. Actual numbers, worked out from your flour temperature, your room temperature, and how long you want fermentation to take.

    I remember thinking this was overkill, until I made the same dough on a cold December morning and a warm July afternoon using the exact same recipe, and got two completely different doughs.

    That’s really what hydration and temperature control are about: consistency. Once you understand the relationship between water, flour, and fermentation time, you stop guessing and start adjusting on purpose.

    Not all flour behaves the same

    This is the one I already wrote about on the calculator page itself, but it’s worth repeating here because it was such a core part of the training: flour strength (how much water it can absorb and hold onto during a long fermentation) is not something you can eyeball. Italian millers rate it by W-value, French millers by ash content (the T-number), and most of the rest of the world by protein percentage on the packaging.

    What this means practically: the same hydration percentage can feel completely different depending on the flour bag in front of you. A 65% hydration dough with a weak all-purpose flour behaves nothing like 65% with a strong bread flour. Once that clicked for me, a lot of dough failures from earlier years suddenly made sense.

    Your hands learn what numbers can’t teach

    Every session split roughly in half: an hour or two of theory, then straight into the practical side: dividing dough balls, stretching, managing dough that had been resting in the fridge, baking the same dough at different oven temperatures and comparing the results side by side. No amount of reading replaces that. At some point, the dough itself tells you if it’s ready: a certain give, a certain elasticity. And that only comes from doing it, badly, a few dozen times first, week after week, until the exam finally rolled around.

    Why I built the calculator anyway

    None of this means the numbers don’t matter — they’re exactly what let me repeat a good result on purpose instead of by accident. That’s the whole idea behind Baker Calculator: it won’t teach you what your hands need to learn, but it will get the ratios right every time, so you can spend your attention on the part that actually takes practice. If you want to try it out, start with a simple 60–65% hydration for a classic round pizza dough, and adjust from there once you get a feel for your own flour.

    — Rob



    Curious what hydration to actually use? I put together a quick reference for different bread types.