Dough Hydration

Dough hydration tells you how much water is present relative to the flour, expressed as a percentage. The formula works because flour is treated as the fixed base ingredient in bread-making, so comparing water mass to flour mass makes recipes easy to scale and compare. A higher hydration usually means a softer, stickier dough with larger air pockets, while a lower hydration gives a firmer dough that is easier to shape.

Use this when adjusting bread, pizza, or sourdough recipes and you want to understand how wet the dough will feel. It is also useful for comparing different formulas or scaling a recipe up and down while keeping the same dough texture.

• Using total dough mass instead of flour mass as the denominator
• Forgetting to convert the result to a percentage by multiplying by 100
• Mixing up grams and millilitres without checking that water mass and flour mass are both measured consistently