Baker's Percentage

Baker's percentage is a way to express every ingredient in a dough as a fraction of the flour weight, with flour always set to 100%. That works because flour is the main structural ingredient in bread, so using it as the reference makes recipes easy to scale up or down while keeping the same balance of ingredients. It also lets bakers compare doughs quickly, since two recipes with the same baker's percentages will behave similarly even if the total batch sizes are different.

Use this when scaling bread, pizza, bagel, or pastry dough recipes and you want to keep the formula consistent. It is also useful for comparing hydration, salt levels, and enrichment between different dough recipes.

• Using total dough weight instead of flour weight as the reference
• Forgetting that flour is always the 100% baseline in baker's percentages
• Mixing up grams and percentages before calculating the ingredient ratio