What If You Could Change Your Recipes with a Simple Percentage Shift? Meet… The Baker’s Percentage

Have you ever wondered why bakers often communicate their recipes in percentages, and what benefits this method holds for achieving the perfect bake? Communicating recipes in percentages is not just for nerdy bakers like me. In fact, there are a couple of benefits to communicating your recipes this way. Baker's Percentage not only enables you to adjust and scale your recipes, particularly when experimenting, but also helps you clearly communicate the recipe's structure and outcome to other bakers. 

What is Baker’s Percentage and what are the Benefits of using it? 

Baker’s percentage is when an ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the total weight of all the flour within a recipe. Expressing a recipe in Baker’s Percentage has some primary advantages (though there are many). 

First, Baker’s Percentage allows you to adjust and scale your recipes, especially when you are experimenting. Let’s say you have a recipe that’s too sweet for your taste. How much should you reduce the sugar by? 5 grams? 10 grams? The exact grams you remove depend on many factors in the recipe, such as how much sugar is in it. With Baker’s Percentage, you simply adjust the percentage as desired. In this instance, you would reduce the percentage of sugar in the recipe (e.g., reduce by 5%). 

Second, Baker’s Percentage allows you to communicate the outcome and the structure of your recipe with other bakers. Using percentages gives other bakers a sense of how the final bake will taste before they even fire up the oven. For example, the amount of water in the dough can tell you how “airy” or “dense” a loaf can be. The amount of water in the dough is often referred to as the hydration. Generally speaking, the higher the hydration, the more airy the dough, and the lower the hydration, the denser the dough. Keep in mind that higher hydration does not always mean better, as it depends on what you want. For example, if you're making a bagel, you may want a lower hydration level. On the flip side, if you want a more airy or light bread, you may want a higher hydration. 

A simple Baker’s Percentage example

A simple bread recipe can help demonstrate how to convert a recipe using Baker's percentage. Let’s take the ingredients (i.e., flour, water, salt, and yeast) in the table below. Remember, the Baker’s Percentage for each recipe is based on the total weight of the flour in the recipe. In this recipe, the total flour weight is 850 grams, so the base for each percentage is 850 grams. 

Ingredient	Weight
Flour	850 grams
Water	649 grams
Salt	17 grams
Instant Yeast	5 grams

To determine the Baker’s Percentage for each ingredient, take the weight of the ingredient, divide it by 850 (i.e., the total weight of the flour in the recipe), and multiply it by 100 (this turns it into a percentage). Congratulations, you calculated your first Baker’s Percentage! Let’s take a look at this recipe. Remember that the amount of water in a recipe is called the hydration. So, for this recipe, the hydration level is 76%. What is the hydration level for your favorite loaf? Let’s say the hydration of your favorite loaf is about 76% as well. What does this tell you? 

The general rule of thumb is that hydration levels above 70% are considered high. Generally speaking, high-hydration doughs tend to be more airy, while lower-hydration doughs tend to be denser. I say this is a general “rule-of-thumb” because the hydration level is not the only factor that impacts the outcome of your dough. For example, the type of flour you use impacts how much hydration your dough can handle. For example, whole wheat flour is “thirstier” than other flours, like all-purpose flour, and can handle much higher hydration levels.

Ingredient	Weight	Baker’s Percentage
Flour	850 grams	850 ÷ 850 x 100=100%
Water	649 grams	649 ÷ 850 x 100 = 76%
Salt	17 grams	17 ÷ 850 x 100 = 2%
Instant Yeast	5 grams	5 ÷ 850 x 100 = 0.6%

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