Baker's percentage is the standard way professional bakeries write recipes: instead of listing absolute weights, every ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the total flour weight. This calculator converts your recipe into that format, reports the dough's hydration, and scales the whole thing to any batch size while keeping every ratio identical.
How the Baker's Percentage Calculator works
Flour is always treated as the 100% reference — if a recipe uses more than one type of flour, all of the flour rows are summed together first. Every other ingredient's baker's percentage is then just its weight divided by that total flour weight, times 100. Water gets the same treatment but is called out separately as "hydration" because it's the single most useful number for comparing doughs — a 60% hydration dough behaves very differently from a 90% hydration dough, independent of how much total dough you're making.
Scaling a recipe follows the same logic in reverse: pick a target flour weight (or a target total dough weight, which the calculator backsolves into an equivalent flour weight), then multiply every ingredient by the ratio between the target and the current flour weight. Because every ingredient scales by the same factor, every baker's percentage — including hydration — stays exactly the same before and after scaling.
Inputs and what they mean
Each row is an ingredient name and a weight in grams. The Role column tells the calculator what to treat as the 100% reference: mark every flour ingredient "Flour" and every water addition "Water". Everything else — salt, yeast, sugar, fat, eggs, mix-ins — should stay "None"; they still get their own baker's percentage, they just aren't part of the reference weight.
The Scale Batch tab accepts either a target flour weight (useful when you know exactly how much flour you have or want to use) or a target total dough weight (useful when you know how many loaves you need and roughly how much dough each one takes). Both modes preserve every percentage in the original recipe.
Limits and edge cases
Levain, sourdough starter, and other preferments are treated as a single opaque ingredient by default — they get their own baker's percentage but their internal flour and water aren't automatically folded into the 100% reference or the hydration total. Bakers who want a "total formula" view that includes preferment flour and water should split the levain into two rows instead — one tagged Flour, one tagged Water, using the starter's known hydration to divide its weight.
Baker's percentages routinely total well over 100% once every ingredient is added — a typical lean bread dough runs 160-180% total (100% flour + roughly 65-75% water + 2% salt + 1-2% yeast, plus any enrichments), and that's completely normal; it's not an error the calculator flags.