Baker's Percentages Explained (With Examples)

Baker’s percentages make bread formulas easier to compare and scale. They express relationships: 20 g salt with 1,000 g flour and 10 g salt with 500 g flour are both 2% salt.

The basic calculation is:

Baker’s percentage = ingredient weight / flour weight × 100

Use the same unit for both weights. Grams are convenient, but kilograms, pounds, or ounces also work if you stay consistent. Flour is the reference by convention; it does not have to be the heaviest ingredient. A dough with more water than flour can have hydration above 100%.

King Arthur’s professional reference distinguishes overall formulas from mixing-stage formulas. Both can be useful. The key is knowing which flour weight is the denominator.

Start With a Simple Formula

For a dough without a preferment:

To get the ingredient weight, divide its percentage by 100 and multiply by the flour weight. Thus 0.8% yeast is 0.008 × flour weight, not 0.8 times the flour weight.

The proportions remain the same when the batch changes. They do not tell you everything about the dough: flour type, temperature, yeast activity, mixing, and fermentation affect the result. Scaling the ingredients also does not mean scaling kneading or baking time by the same multiplier.

Why Weights Help More Than Cup Estimates

A cup of flour does not have one universal mass. Flour type and whether you sift, spoon, or scoop affect how much enters the cup. Salt crystal size also matters: a teaspoon of flaky kosher salt weighs much less than a teaspoon of fine table salt.

Use the recipe author’s gram weights when supplied. For a familiar cup-based recipe, weigh what you actually measure during a successful bake and record those weights. A kitchen scale is useful; small yeast quantities may need a scale with finer resolution than a general kitchen model.

As examples, King Arthur’s ingredient chart lists:

These are the publisher’s ingredient-specific conversions. They do not make every measured cup of flour weigh 120 g, nor every teaspoon of yeast exactly 3 g. Use the product and measuring convention specified by the recipe.

For liquids, distinguish volume from weight. A US customary cup is about 236.6 mL, and a US tablespoon about 14.8 mL; NIST’s conversion tables give these relationships. Water near room temperature weighs close to 1 g per mL, so about 237 g and 15 g respectively are practical approximations. A fluid ounce is not the same unit as an ounce by weight.

Some recipe publishers deliberately use their own rounded weight equivalents—for example, King Arthur’s chart lists 227 g water per cup. Follow a recipe’s supplied grams consistently instead of mixing conversion charts or replacing them mid-recipe.

Multiple Flours: Add Them Before Dividing

In an overall formula, all the flour going into the dough adds up to 100%, including any flour in a levain or other preferment.

Here is a flour-and-water example with an 85/15 blend:

If 150 g of the dough comes from a 100%-hydration white-flour levain, it supplies 75 g white flour and 75 g water. Those amounts are already part of the totals above. The final mixing list becomes:

• 775 g white bread flour
• 150 g whole wheat flour
• 705 g water
• 20 g salt
• 150 g levain, containing the remaining 75 g flour and 75 g water

The two lists describe the same 1,800 g of dough. Do not add the full 850 g white flour and 780 g water and then add the levain as well: that would be a different formula. When listing both a total-flour subtotal and its individual flours, do not add the subtotal a second time either.

Changing the overall blend to 75% white and 25% whole wheat means 750 g white and 250 g whole wheat per 1,000 g total flour. Account for the levain’s flour blend before deciding what to add at the final mix. You may need to adjust hydration for the new flour, but there is no fixed water increase that suits every whole-grain flour or bread flour brand.

Prefermented Flour Is Different From Levain Weight

Prefermented flour, or PFF, measures the flour fermented before the final mix:

PFF % = flour in preferment / total flour in complete formula × 100

For 1,000 g total flour with 300 g in a poolish, PFF is 30%. If that poolish contains 300 g water too, it weighs about 600 g plus its yeast. Its mass is not the same thing as its flour contribution.

In the 1,800 g dough example above:

All three calculations are mathematically valid, but they describe different things. A recipe that says “15% starter” without identifying the basis and starter hydration is incomplete information.

More ripe preferment can speed the final fermentation when other conditions are comparable, but PFF is not a direct measure of living cells, acidity, or flavor quality. A ripe poolish and an exhausted one do not behave identically at the same percentage. Nor does raising PFF guarantee a more complex flavor. Follow the timing and maturity cues in the complete preferment method.

Finding flour and water inside a levain

For a levain made only from flour and water, convert hydration to a decimal first:

Levain flour = levain weight / (1 + hydration as a decimal)

Levain water = levain weight − levain flour

Examples:

• 150 g levain at 100% hydration: 150 / 2 = 75 g flour and 75 g water.
• 160 g levain at 60% hydration: 160 / 1.6 = 100 g flour and 60 g water.

Include the flour and water already present in the seed starter when calculating the build. For ordinary recipe math, these are formulation weights; evaporation, fermentation losses, and additions other than flour and water require separate accounting if precision at that level matters.

Scale From Flour Weight or Dough Weight

For the lean formula at the start, using 750 g flour gives:

A baker’s-percentage total greater than 100% is expected: it is relative to the flour, not the fraction of finished dough represented by each ingredient.

To work backward from a target dough weight:

Required flour = target dough weight / (total formula percentage / 100)

For this formula, 1,311 / 1.748 = 750 g flour. Divide the dough into three pieces of 437 g if you want three equal pieces. They will weigh less after baking because of moisture loss; dough yield is not finished-bread yield.

When scaling a prefermented bread, scale the overall formula and its preferment allocation together. Alternatively, multiply every item in a verified mixing list by the same scale factor. Do not count a levain both as an ingredient and again as its component flour and water in the same dough-weight total.

Large changes in batch size can change mixing efficiency, heat gain, fermentation behavior, and cooling. Respect the mixer and baking vessel capacities and reassess the process; the arithmetic preserves ratios, not every operating condition.

Read Ratios as Clues, Not a Complete Recipe

Hydration: a mostly white wheat dough at 55–65% will often feel firmer than the same flour at 75–85%. Whole-grain flour, damaged starch, added ingredients, and mixing change that comparison. Hydration can also exceed 100%; there is no universal upper limit of 85%. See our hydration guide.

For enriched doughs, state how you count milk, eggs, butter, and syrups. Some bakers list water-containing liquids at their full ingredient weights; others estimate their actual water content. Those conventions yield different hydration numbers. Fifty percent butter means 500 g butter per 1,000 g flour, not 500 g pure fat; 50% whole egg is not 50% water. King Arthur’s hydration explanation discusses these conventions.

Salt: around 1.8–2.2% is common in many wheat breads. King Arthur’s professional guidance gives 1.8–2% as a general range. Salt affects taste, gluten behavior, and fermentation, but 1.5% or 2.5% is not a sharp boundary between functional and failed dough. A low-salt formula needs an appropriate overall process. Include salt already present in an old-dough preferment when calculating the total.

Yeast: identify the type before comparing percentages. King Arthur gives fresh yeast × 0.33 as a general conversion to instant, equivalent to roughly three times as much fresh yeast for a given instant-yeast weight. Its yeast reference also recommends using the manufacturer’s conversion. Different dry yeast products and formulas can behave differently.

Yeast percentage alone cannot promise a one-hour, six-hour, or overnight rise. The small dose in an overnight white bread works with that recipe’s flour, temperature, time, and handling. Lower yeast generally requires more fermentation time under otherwise comparable conditions; longer does not automatically mean better flavor.

Sugar and fat: these help describe enrichment, but breads extend beyond tidy ranges such as 0–12% sugar or 0–50% butter. Different sugars, flour treatments, fermentation, and oven conditions affect browning; there is no universal 5% sugar threshold that forces a lower baking temperature.

Osmotolerant yeast can be useful in sweet dough, but it is not mandatory for every formula above 10% sugar. For example, Lesaffre’s Saf-instant Gold specification targets doughs with 5% or more sugar while listing Red for 0–10%. Follow the yeast product’s recommendations and the tested formula.

Convert a Volume Recipe Without Inventing Precision

First obtain ingredient weights from the original recipe, its stated conversion convention, or measurements of the ingredients as you actually prepare them. A generic conversion chart can give a starting estimate; it cannot recover exactly how the author filled a cup.

Suppose your recorded ingredients are 405 g flour, 280 g water, 9 g salt, and 4 g instant yeast. These are example weights, not universal equivalents for a certain number of cups or teaspoons.

Keep enough precision during the calculation, then round practical ingredient weights for your scale. Avoid rounding a tiny yeast dose to zero.

A Poolish Example: Overall Versus Final-Mix Percentages

Consider this mixing list:

Poolish: 300 g flour + 300 g water + a pinch of yeast.

Add at the final mix: 700 g flour + 400 g water + 20 g salt + 6 g instant yeast + all of the poolish.

The overall formula contains:

• Total flour: 300 + 700 = 1,000 g.
• Total water: 300 + 400 = 700 g.
• Overall hydration: 700 / 1,000 × 100 = 70%.
• Salt: 20 / 1,000 × 100 = 2%.
• PFF: 300 / 1,000 × 100 = 30%.
• Total yeast: 6 g plus the poolish yeast. Weigh that pinch if you need an exact percentage.

The final-mix water divided by final-mix flour is 400 / 700 = 57.1%. That can correctly describe those additions, but it is not the hydration of the complete dough. The preferment supplies the rest.

The same distinction applies to levain and pâte fermentée. Keep a total-formula view for comparison and a final-mixing list for weighing ingredients, with each preferment’s contents accounted for once.

For more examples, see the preferments guide. Pair percentages with the desired dough temperature guide when planning fermentation, and use our bread books guide to choose a deeper reference.