Baker's Percentage

Baker’s percentage rewrites every ingredient in a dough as a percentage of the flour mass, which makes formulas easy to scale up or down without changing the recipe’s balance. Flour is used as the reference because it is the main structural ingredient in bread, so comparing everything to flour gives a consistent way to describe dough strength, hydration, salt level, fat content, and more. If an ingredient has the same mass as the flour, its baker’s percentage is 100%; if it is half the flour mass, it is 50%, and so on.

Use this when scaling bread, pizza, or pastry formulas for different batch sizes while keeping the same ratios. It is also useful for comparing two recipes or analyzing how changes in water, salt, yeast, or fat will affect the dough.

• Using total dough mass instead of flour mass as the reference
• Forgetting that flour is always 100%, not 1%
• Mixing up grams and percentages when scaling a recipe