Baker's Percentage Calculator
Turn a recipe into percentages of its flour, or turn a set of percentages back into grams for any batch size.
Flour total: 500 g (100%). Dough weight: 960 g.
Flour rows add up to 100%. Dough weight: 960 g.
Mark every flour as Flour so they share the 100%.
Takes your flour and water weights to the main calculator, which adds salt and starter from its Sourdough preset and builds a baking schedule.
Salt in bread calculator
Near 1.5% the dough ferments faster and tastes flatter, while toward 2.5% fermentation slows noticeably and the crumb firms up, so most loaves sit between 1.8% and 2.2%.
Salt
10 g
More on what salt does to a dough in the role of salt in bread.
Why flour is always 100%
Every ingredient in a bread formula is measured against the flour, so the flour itself is the fixed point at 100%. If a recipe uses two flours, they share the 100% between them: 400 g of bread flour and 100 g of whole wheat come out as 80% and 20%. Everything else is a share of that flour total, which is why the full list of percentages usually adds up to well over 100.
Scaling and comparing recipes
Percentages make a recipe independent of batch size. A formula of 100% flour, 70% water, 2% salt and 20% starter bakes one loaf from 500 g of flour or four loaves from 2 kg, and the dough behaves the same way in both. The "Percentages to grams" tab does that multiplication for any flour weight you enter.
Percentages also let you compare recipes that look nothing alike on the page. Two sourdough recipes, one written in cups and one in grams, can turn out to be the same dough once you convert them. Or the conversion shows that one carries twice the salt of the other.
A worked example
Say a recipe calls for 800 g of bread flour, 200 g of whole wheat, 720 g of water, 20 g of salt and 150 g of starter. The flour total is 1000 g, so bread flour is 80% and whole wheat is 20%. Water is 720 ÷ 1000, or 72%. Salt is 2% and starter is 15%.
To bake a smaller batch from 600 g of flour, multiply each percentage by 6: 480 g of bread flour, 120 g of whole wheat, 432 g of water, 12 g of salt and 90 g of starter. The dough is the same, only smaller.
Where the system bends
Preferments are the first place the simple version gets fuzzy. A starter or poolish holds its own flour and water, so a dough listed at 70% water with 20% starter is closer to 73% once the starter is counted. This calculator lists the starter as its own line, the way most recipes are written. Preferments 101 covers how bakers account for them in more detail.
Enriched doughs bend it too. Milk and eggs both carry water, so a brioche with 20% milk and 30% eggs is wetter than its water line suggests, and bakers judge those doughs by feel as much as by the number. For the full background on the system, see baker's percentages explained.
Baker's percentage questions
What is a baker's percentage?
It is the weight of an ingredient divided by the total flour weight, times 100. Flour is always 100% and every other ingredient is written as a share of it, so 350 g of water with 500 g of flour is 70%.
Why is flour 100%?
Flour is the ingredient every other amount depends on, so it becomes the fixed reference. Measuring everything against it means a formula scales by changing one number, and the percentages stay the same at any batch size. It is also why the percentages for a whole recipe add up to more than 100.
How do I convert a recipe?
Weigh everything in grams first. Add up all the flour, then divide each ingredient by that total and multiply by 100. Enter the rows in the Recipe to percentages tab and it does the division for you, including recipes with more than one flour.
How much salt per 500g of flour?
10 g, which is 2%. Most bread sits between 1.8% and 2.2%, so 9 to 11 g for 500 g of flour. Go lower for a faster ferment or a salty topping, and don't go much above 2.5%, where salt starts to hold fermentation back.
How do I handle a preferment?
The simplest way is to list the starter or poolish as its own ingredient at its own percentage, the way most recipes do. For exact hydration, split it into its flour and water and add those to the flour and water lines. A 100 g starter at 100% hydration is 50 g of each, and the hydration calculator on this site does that split for you.