Tag: Hydration

  • 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

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

    Knead to Know

    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

  • 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.