Sourdough · Baker's Percentage
Set your flour weight and each ingredient's percentage — get exact grams for water, salt, starter, fat, and sugar, live.
Example formula
100 : 70 : 20 : 2
Flour is always the anchor at 100%. Every other ingredient is weighed against it.
Live calculator · updates as you type
Your recipe, weighed
960gtotal dough weight
Flour is always 100% — every other ingredient is weighed against it, so the percentages add up to more than 100%. Results are estimates; adjust to your flour, starter, and taste.
Baker's percentage guide
Baker's percentage is the language professional bakers use to write, scale, and compare recipes. Once your recipe is expressed as percentages of flour, you can make one loaf or ten without ever rewriting it.
The hydration range for most sourdough loaves.
More starter ferments faster; less takes longer.
Enough for flavour and controlled fermentation.
Example: 10g salt ÷ 500g flour = 2% salt. To get grams, multiply: 500 × 2 ÷ 100 = 10g.
Enter your total flour weight, then set each ingredient's baker's percentage — water (hydration), starter, salt, and optionally fat and sugar. The calculator instantly converts those percentages into exact gram weights and shows the total dough weight.
Use the recipe presets to start from a common formula, then tweak. Because everything is tied to flour, changing the flour weight rescales the whole recipe automatically.
Baker's percentage expresses every ingredient as a percentage of the total flour weight. Flour is always 100%. Water at 70% means 70g of water for every 100g of flour; salt at 2% means 2g per 100g of flour.
The percentages usually add up to well over 100%, and that's correct — they're each measured against flour, not against the whole dough.
Percentages make recipes portable. Two loaves at very different sizes can share the exact same formula, and you can compare any two recipes at a glance — a 75% dough is wetter than a 68% one, whatever their batch sizes.
It also makes troubleshooting easier. If a loaf is too slack, you adjust the water percentage; too bland, the salt percentage — small, precise changes rather than guesswork.
To scale, keep the percentages fixed and change only the flour weight. Doubling from 500g to 1000g of flour doubles every ingredient automatically — the loaf stays identical in character, just larger.
Working backward from a target dough weight is just as easy: adjust the flour until the total matches the size you need.
Starter contains both flour and water, so for precise work bakers sometimes calculate "total" hydration that includes the starter's water. A 100% hydration starter is half flour, half water by weight.
This calculator treats starter as its own percentage line for simplicity. For a deeper split, pair it with the starter calculator and the hydration calculator.
Get the complete Sourdough Baking Playbook — all the calculators in one printable reference.
Quick answers for reading, writing, and scaling formulas.
Baker's percentage expresses every ingredient as a percentage of the total flour weight, which is always 100%. If a dough has 500g flour and 350g water, the water is 70%. It lets bakers scale and compare recipes regardless of batch size.
Divide each ingredient's weight by the total flour weight, then multiply by 100. For example, 10g of salt with 500g of flour is 10 ÷ 500 × 100 = 2% salt. This calculator does the reverse: you set the percentages and it returns the grams.
A common sourdough is around 70–78% water (hydration), 1.8–2.2% salt, and 15–25% starter, all relative to the flour. Enriched doughs add fat (4–10%) and sugar (2–8%). These are starting points — adjust to your flour and taste.
Flour is the anchor of a bread formula, so it's fixed at 100% and every other ingredient is measured against it. This makes recipes easy to scale: change only the flour weight and every other ingredient recalculates in proportion.
Most bread doughs use 1.8–2.2% salt by baker's percentage, with 2% being a common default. Below about 1.5% the bread tastes flat and ferments faster; above 2.5% it can taste salty and slow fermentation noticeably.
No — the totals usually exceed 100%. Because every ingredient is a percentage of flour (not of the whole dough), adding water at 70%, salt at 2%, and starter at 20% gives a total of 192%. That's expected and correct.