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

Unclassified ingredients remain opaque. The explicit Starter/Levain role assumes 100% hydration and automatically counts half its mass as flour and half as water. 450 g Flour + 300 g Water + 100 g Starter gives 500 g flour, 350 g water, 70% hydration and 850 g dough. For another starter hydration, enter its actual flour and water as separate component rows instead of the whole starter row; never count both representations.