Baker's Percentage Calculator — Hydration + Recipe Scaling

Real-world use cases

• Hit a target hydration before you mix

  You want a 75% hydration ciabatta but only know you have about 800 g of bread flour. Put flour in scale mode, set water to 75%, and the tool tells you to weigh 600 g of water. You see the number before the dough is wet, so there is no mid-mix scramble adjusting by feel and no accidental 82% soup that never holds a shape on the peel.

• Reverse-engineer a recipe you weighed by eye

  A bake came out perfect but you free-handed the amounts. Type the grams you actually used — 920 g flour, 660 g water, 18 g salt, a 150 g starter — and read back the percentages: 72% hydration, 2% salt, 16% starter. Now it is a real formula you can repeat and scale, not a one-off you will never reproduce.

• Scale a 1 kg formula down to a single test loaf

  Your house sourdough is written for 1 kg of flour but you only want one 450 g loaf to test a new flour. Switch to scale mode, change the flour to 250 g, and every ingredient redraws — 175 g water, 5 g salt, 50 g starter — at the identical ratios. The test bake behaves like the full batch instead of a guess.

• Compare two recipes on the same footing

  One blog gives a baguette in cups, another in grams, and you cannot tell which is wetter. Enter both as weights, read the hydration off each, and the comparison is instant: 65% versus 73% is eight points of water, the difference between a tight crumb and an open one. The percentage strips away batch size and unit noise.

• Build a bakery batch sheet for production

  You are scaling a tested loaf to a 12 kg flour batch for a market stall. Enter 12000 g flour, keep your tested percentages, and the tool prints every ingredient in grams for the day's mix. Copy the summary straight into the batch sheet, and share the URL so a second baker opens the exact same numbers.

Common pitfalls

• Treating the percentages as parts of 100. They are parts of the flour, not of the whole, so they legitimately sum past 100%. A 70% / 2% / 1% dough is normal — if you force everything to add to 100 you will starve the dough of water.

• Counting starter or levain water in hydration but forgetting its flour. A 100% hydration starter is half flour, half water. If you fold in 200 g of it, that is 100 g extra flour and 100 g extra water — leave it out of the flour total and your real hydration reads higher than the dough actually is.

• Mixing the two modes. Typing a percentage into the weights column, or a gram value into the percentage column, produces a number that looks plausible but is meaningless. Pick weights-to-percentages when you have grams, percentages-to-weights when you have a formula, and keep each column in its own unit.

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