Tag: dough calculator

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

    Knead to Know

    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

    Knead to Know

    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

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

    Knead to Know

    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.