Baker's percentage is one of the most powerful tools bakers have in their arsenal to help them understand how dough works.
In bakers percentages all the flour in a formula, or recipe, is arbitrarily defined as being 100%, and all the other ingredients are expressed as a percentage of that.
For example, if there are 1,000 grams of flour in a batch of bread and 650 grams of water, we say there is 100% flour and 65% water.
This immediately seems wrong to many people as, by usual usage, 100% is everything. All of it. And we haven't looked at the salt, riser and other ingredients yet.
Perhaps it should have been called baker's ratios. Still, it is what it is. There are two points worth making here.
- The percentage of water and oils are referred to as "dough hydration", which bakers pay a lot of attention to. German bakers refer to the amount of water as "dough yield" and their texts make it plain that "dough yield" is where their profit margin lies. Water is, after all, cheaper than flour.
- For most breads in the United States, the percentage of salt is about 2%. If you use much more, the salt taste is too obvious. If you use much less and the bread will be too bland for most tastes and yeast will tend to over rise. Some countries are more concerned with sodium in the diet and the customary amounts of salt range from 1 to 1.4%
Greetings Miken- I LOVE your site and refer budding bakers to it all the time. Followed one of your links to this page out of curiosity and I now have one more thing I think I understand. Unless your example is really correct. As I read it the total is 1650 g and so the flour is 61% and the water is 39%
Hi Sue,
Thanks for your question. How bakers handle their formulas varies from place to place. In the USA, we handle it in a way that is guaranteed to confuse beginners.
In Europe, they tend to use percentages the way a person well versed in math would use them. If there is 100 grams of flour and 60 grams of water, the flour would be 62.5% and the water 37.5%, and they would add up to 100%. Easy peasy! Nothing there to make a person with decent math skills scream in anger or confusion.
In the USA, we arbitrarily decree that flour is 100% and all other ingredients are expressed as a percentage of the flour. So, with 100 grams of flour and 60 grams of water we’d have flour at 100% and water at 60% with the total being 160%. And this is enough to make any mathematically trained person scream in anger and confusion. After all, 100% is everything, it is all that is in the recipe, amirite? Normally, yes. In baker’s percentag4es, not so much. If whoever came up with this had called it bakers ratios it would have been much easier to understand.
Back to your question, in Europe your calculations would undoubtedly be correct. In the USA, the numbers I used are correct.
Thanks,
-Mike