Baker's Percentage Calculator
Enter your flour weight and dial in hydration, salt, and starter percentages. Get exact weights for a perfectly balanced dough.
Why baker's percentage changes everything
Baker's percentage flips how you think about a recipe. Instead of treating flour, water, and salt as independent measurements, you anchor everything to the flour weight as 100%. Water becomes a percentage of flour. Salt becomes a percentage of flour. Starter becomes a percentage of flour. Once you internalize this system, you stop reading recipes as fixed weights and start reading them as ratios — and that is how every professional bakery on the planet thinks about dough.
The practical advantage is scaling. If you nail a 500g flour recipe at 72% hydration and want to bake a double batch for a dinner party, the math is trivial: double everything. The ratios stay locked. There is no guesswork about whether 700g of water is too much for 1kg of flour, because 70% is 70% whether the absolute numbers are 100g or 100kg. This is also why pros can read a Tartine recipe and instantly know it is a high-hydration country loaf, while a Pain de Mie recipe is in the 65-68% range — the percentages tell the whole story before you measure a single gram.
Standard professional ratios sit in tight, predictable bands. Hydration: 70-78% for most artisan loaves. Salt: 2% almost always (1.8% if you like a flatter flavor, 2.2% if you want assertive). Starter: 15-20% if you want a long, flavorful overnight bulk, up to 25% if you need to speed things up. As a worked example, take 500g flour at 72% hydration with 2% salt and 20% starter. The calculator above does the math for you, but in your head it is 360g water, 10g salt, and 100g starter. Once you see those numbers, you can reproduce that same loaf at any size, on any day, in any bakery — that is the power of the system.
1. Flour Weight
2. Baker's Percentages
Your Dough Recipe
500g
Flour
360g
Water
10g
Salt
100g
Starter
Total Dough Weight
970g
Baker's Percentage Breakdown
💡 Hydration Insight
Classic sourdough range. Good balance of open crumb and workability.
• Want a more open crumb? Try 78–80% hydration.
• Want a tighter, sandwich-style crumb? Try 65%.
• New to sourdough? Start at 70–72% and work your way up.
How hydration affects your bread
Hydration is the single biggest variable that decides what kind of bread comes out of your oven. Same flour, same starter, same shaping technique — change the hydration by 10% and you get a fundamentally different loaf. Here is how the four main bands behave so you can pick the right target before you even start mixing.
65–70% — Low hydration
Tighter, more uniform crumb. The dough is firm, behaves predictably under your hands, and holds shape during proofing without any gymnastics. This is the right zone for sandwich loaves, Pain de Mie, dinner rolls, and any bread that needs to slice cleanly without tearing. If you are a beginner, this is also the friendliest band to learn shaping in — the dough will not punish small mistakes. Bagels and pretzels go even lower, in the 55-62% range, because they need that dense, chewy structure.
70–75% — Classic range
The sweet spot for most home bakers. You get an open, irregular crumb that looks unmistakably like sourdough, without the dough turning into a slippery puddle on your counter. Almost every "first sourdough" recipe lives here for a reason — Forkish's Saturday White Bread is 78% but the technique-friendly variants sit closer to 72%. Plan to live in this range for your first six months. The crumb will be open enough to impress anyone you serve it to, and the dough is forgiving enough that you can mess up a fold or two without destroying the loaf.
75–82% — High hydration
Wild, open crumb with shiny holes and that translucent gluten-window look you see all over Instagram. Tartine country loaves sit right at the top of this band, around 80%. The catch is that the dough is much harder to handle — it is sticky, slack, and demands confident shaping. You need strong gluten development before bulk fermentation, and you need to recognize when bulk is done by sight rather than time. Maurizio Leo's Perfect Loaf recipes operate in this zone and assume you have the chops. Push into this band only after the 70-75% range feels boring.
82–90% — Very high hydration
You are in ciabatta and focaccia territory now. The dough is more like a thick batter — pourable, impossible to free-form shape, and barely cohesive enough to hold gas. This is why ciabatta gets stretched into rough rectangles on a heavily floured peel, and focaccia gets poured straight into an oiled pan. The reward is a crumb so open you can see through individual holes, and a flavor that is wildly aromatic from all that water hosting the fermentation. Skip this band entirely until you can nail an 80% Tartine loaf with consistent crumb structure three bakes in a row.
Common hydration mistakes that wreck your loaf
Hydration math is straightforward, but the mistakes around it are sneaky. These are the five that show up most often when home bakers troubleshoot a flat, dense, or gummy loaf.
1. Adding water mid-bulk because the dough "feels stiff"
Strong gluten makes for stiff dough. That is the whole point. After your initial mix, the dough should feel tight and resistant — you have just developed gluten and it is doing its job. If you panic-add water at the 30-minute mark, you destroy the structure you just built and end up with a slack, wet mess that cannot hold gas. Trust the recipe, do your folds, and watch the dough loosen naturally over bulk fermentation as the gluten relaxes and the starter does its work.
2. Forgetting that whole wheat absorbs more water than white
Whole wheat and rye bran soak up significantly more water than refined white flour. If a recipe is written for King Arthur Bread Flour at 75% hydration and you swap in 100% Bob's Red Mill whole wheat, you need to bump hydration by 3-5%. Otherwise the dough feels dry, the crumb comes out tight, and you wonder why your "same recipe" suddenly fails. Same goes for any recipe with 20%+ whole grains — add 2-3% hydration as a starting compensation.
3. Measuring hydration including starter water without adjusting
A 100% hydration starter is half flour, half water by weight. If your recipe calls for 500g flour and 100g of 100% starter, you actually have 550g flour and 50g of starter water already in the dough before you add the "recipe water." For most home bakers this rounding error does not matter. But if you are chasing precise results — say, replicating a 78% pro recipe at home — subtract the starter's flour and water from your totals first, then calculate hydration on what remains. Most calculators (including this one) skip this nuance for simplicity.
4. Switching flour brands without retesting
King Arthur AP, Bob's Red Mill Artisan, Central Milling, and your local mill all absorb water differently because of protein content, ash content, and how finely they are milled. A 75% recipe that sings with King Arthur Bread Flour might feel underhydrated with Central Milling Type 70 because the latter has more bran-like particles that take longer to drink. When you switch brands, treat your first bake as a calibration round. Adjust by 2-3% in either direction based on how the dough handles, and write the new number down.
5. Cold water in winter killing fermentation speed
Hydration is locked in by the math, but the temperature of the water you add changes how fast the dough ferments. In winter, tap water can hit 50-55F (10-13C) and the dough ends up a chilly 70F (21C) instead of the 76-78F (24-26C) most recipes assume. Bulk fermentation that should take 4 hours suddenly takes 7. The fix is simple: warm your water to 90-95F (32-35C) before mixing in winter, and use cooler tap water in summer. The hydration percentage stays the same — only the starting temperature shifts.
Pro tips from professional bakeries
These are the small adjustments that separate a good home loaf from a great one. None of them are secrets, but they all show up in the methods of bakeries like Tartine, Sullivan Street, and Bien Cuit.
🍞 Use flour with at least 11% protein for hydration above 75%
High hydration only works if the gluten can hold the water. King Arthur Bread Flour (12.7% protein) and Central Milling Artisan Bakers Craft (11.5%) both handle 78%+ comfortably. All-purpose flour at 9-10% protein will collapse. Check the nutrition label: protein per serving divided by serving size gives you the percentage.
🍞 Autolyse 30-60 minutes before adding salt and starter
Mix just flour and water, let it sit covered for 30-60 minutes, then add salt and starter. The flour fully hydrates during the rest, gluten develops on its own without any kneading, and the dough becomes noticeably more extensible. The practical effect is that an autolysed 75% dough handles like a non-autolysed 72% dough — you get a 3-5% effective hydration boost without changing your recipe.
🍞 Increase hydration in 1-2% increments per bake until shaping fails
Rather than jumping from 72% to 80% and getting overwhelmed, climb the ladder one rung at a time. Bake at 72%, then 73%, then 74%. Keep going until you hit a bake where shaping falls apart and the loaf comes out flat. That is your personal ceiling with your current flour and technique. Stay one rung below that for everyday bakes, and only push it higher after a few weeks of consistent results.
🍞 Higher hydration needs longer bulk fermentation
Water and time work together. A 78% dough at the same temperature as a 72% dough needs roughly 30-45 more minutes of bulk to develop the same gas structure, because the wetter dough has more room for fermentation to spread but takes longer to build the gluten network that traps it. Watch the dough, not the clock — it should rise 50-75% and feel airy when you tilt the container.
🍞 Refrigerated cold ferment forgives more hydration mistakes
A 12-hour overnight retard at 38-40F (3-4C) does two things: it slows fermentation so you cannot easily over-proof, and it tightens up wet dough so shaping the next morning is dramatically easier. If you are pushing into 78%+ territory, always retard. Pull the dough straight from the fridge, shape on the cold dough surface, and you will be amazed at how cooperative even an 82% dough becomes.
🍞 Aim for windowpane gluten development before bulk
Pinch off a small piece of dough and stretch it between your fingers. If you can stretch it thin enough to see light through without it tearing, your gluten is ready. High hydration will not save weak gluten — if you skip the development step, no amount of folding during bulk will rescue the loaf. Spend the extra five minutes on stretch-and-folds during the first hour of bulk to lock this in.