Baker's Percentages, Explained Like a Load Calc
Okay, this lesson is the one I actually get excited about, because it's the part of bread that felt like home to me from the first afternoon.
I spent forty years reading load charts and tolerance sheets before I ever touched a dough. Baker's percentages are the same kind of math, just wetter. Once that clicked for me, hydration percentage stopped being some mystery bakery term and turned into a spec I could work with. I want it to click for you the same way, because it'll save you from guessing forever.
The Idea, Stripped Down
In a load calc, everything gets sized against a fixed member. In baker's math, everything gets sized against the flour. Flour is always 100 percent. Every other ingredient is a percentage of that flour weight. Not the total dough weight. Just the flour.
So if a recipe says:
- Flour: 500 g (100%)
- Water: 375 g (75%)
- Salt: 10 g (2%)
- Starter: 100 g (20%)
That 75 percent is your hydration. That's the water weight divided by the flour weight, times 100. Nothing fancier than that.
Why This Beats Cups, Every Time
I've said it before in this course and I'll keep saying it: weigh everything, no cups. A cup of flour packed after a trip up the canyon in humid air weighs different than a cup scooped dry in January. Grams don't care about any of that. Grams are grams.
Percentages are what let you take a recipe you like and scale it up or down without breaking it. Say you want two loaves instead of one. You don't hunt down a new recipe. You just double every gram number and the ratios hold. That's the whole beauty of it. It's the same reason a framer doesn't redraw a whole set of plans just because the wall got two feet longer. You scale the numbers, the ratios stay true.
Working It Out at Home
Here's how I'd actually walk you through it, standing at your counter.
- Weigh your flour first. Everything else gets built off this number. Let's say 500 grams.
- Decide your hydration. For a beginner loaf I like 70 to 75 percent. Higher gets you a more open, wetter crumb, but it also gets harder to handle, especially while you're still learning what dough is supposed to feel like in your hands.
- Multiply. 500 grams flour times 0.75 hydration equals 375 grams water. That's it. That's the whole calculation.
- Salt runs 2 percent, generally. 500 times 0.02 is 10 grams. I weigh this too. Don't eyeball salt, it matters more than people think.
- Starter usually sits around 15 to 20 percent. 500 times 0.20 is 100 grams.
Write those numbers down somewhere you'll actually look at them again. I use a little notebook. I've also used the back of a lumber takeoff sheet before, which is a story for another lesson, but let's just say Richard found it in my truck and had some questions about whether the deck was made of dough now.
Our Air Changes the Math a Little
Here's where I'll push back on some of the recipes you'll find online. A lot of them are written by people baking at sea level in a humid kitchen. We are not that. We're up around 4,600 feet with dry air most of the year, and that dries your dough out faster than the recipe expects. I usually nudge my hydration up a few percent from what a coastal blogger recommends, and I watch the dough itself, not the clock, to decide if I got it right. Dough that feels tacky but not sticky, that holds together when you pull at it. That's what I'm after, more than any number on a page.
A Caution Worth Saying Plainly
If you're new to this, don't jump straight to 85 percent hydration because you saw a gorgeous crumb shot online. High hydration dough is genuinely harder to shape, and a beginner working with a slack, wet dough usually ends up with a flat, sad loaf and a sticky mess on the counter. I'd honestly rather you land a solid loaf at 70 percent than fight a puddle at 85. Start conservative. You can always push hydration up later once your hands know what they're doing.
Where This Bit Me the First Time
My very first starter, before I ever got to percentages at all, went pink around day five. I about cried. Turned out pink means it's gone bad and you throw the whole thing out and start over, no saving it. Second attempt I kept in the oven with just the oven light on for warmth, and that one took. I remember the relief of that one working. Percentages didn't save me from that mistake, understanding what the starter actually needed did. But once I had a starter that behaved, the percentages are what let me repeat that first good loaf instead of it being a fluke.
Before Next Time
Take one recipe you've been curious about and convert it to baker's percentages yourself, flour as 100 percent, everything else worked out from there. Bring your numbers to class and we'll check your math together.