In baker's math, flour is always 100% and every other ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the flour's weight. Enter your weights in grams to see the formula.
Baker's percentage expresses every ingredient as a percentage of the total flour weight, which is fixed at 100%. This makes formulas easy to scale to any batch size and easy to compare between recipes regardless of how much dough they make — a 65% hydration formula behaves the same whether it makes one loaf or fifty.
Source: Baker's percentage (also called baker's math) is the standard formula notation used throughout professional bread baking, as documented in resources like The Bread Baker's Guild of America and King Arthur Baking's formula guides.
Flour is set as the baseline (100%) because it's typically the largest and most structurally important ingredient in a dough, making it a stable reference point for expressing every other ingredient's proportion.
Add all the flours together first to get the 100% baseline, then express every other ingredient (including any secondary flour) as a percentage of that combined total.
Most sandwich breads sit around 60–65% hydration, while rustic and artisan loaves like ciabatta or sourdough often run 70–85% or higher for a more open, airy crumb.
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