Tag: recipe scaling

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.

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.)

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.