Baker's Percentage Calculator — hydration & dough
Turn baker's percentages into gram weights (flour = 100%), or scale a formula to a target dough weight — hydration included, in your browser.
🔒 Runs entirely in your browser. Your input and output are never sent to a server or stored — fully private.
Every ingredient is a percentage of the flour weight (flour = 100%). Enter flour weight, or work backwards from a target dough weight.
Baker’s percentages are relative to flour = 100%. Hydration sums the rows marked as liquid. Round to whole grams for most home baking.
About this tool
Bread recipes make far more sense in baker's percentage, and this calculator works in it natively. Set flour to 100% and give each ingredient as a percentage of the flour weight — 68% water, 2% salt, 1% yeast — and it returns the grams for any batch size. It also works in reverse: enter a target dough weight, say 900 g for two loaves, and it derives every ingredient. Hydration is computed automatically, so you can compare a ciabatta to a bagel at a glance. Everything runs locally in your browser.
Frequently asked questions
Why do bakers use percentages instead of normal recipe amounts?
Two reasons: scaling and comparison. Because every ingredient is expressed against flour = 100%, the same formula works for one loaf or one hundred — multiply by a different flour weight and nothing else changes. And since the numbers are independent of batch size, you can compare recipes directly: a 75% hydration dough will be wetter and more open-crumbed than a 60% one, whoever wrote the recipe and whatever quantities they used. Spotting that from gram amounts alone is nearly impossible.
What is hydration, and what do different levels mean?
Hydration is the total liquid weight divided by the total flour weight, as a percentage. Around 55–60% gives stiff doughs like bagels; 60–70% covers most sandwich loaves and everyday breads; 70–80% produces open, airy crumb in ciabatta and rustic sourdough; above 80% you are in very slack, hard-to-handle territory. Higher hydration generally means bigger holes and a moister crumb but stickier handling. Note that whole-grain flours absorb more water, so the same percentage feels drier with them.
How does the reverse mode work, and does my formula leave my device?
The reverse mode starts from your target dough weight — say 900 g for two 450 g loaves — and divides it by the sum of all percentages (100% flour plus everything else) to find the flour weight; each ingredient then follows from its own percentage. Add a percent or two to the target to cover dough lost to the bowl and bench. Your formulas never leave your device: the math is plain JavaScript in the browser, with nothing uploaded, so your recipes stay yours.