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Bakers Percentage

To avoid making mistakes when converting recipe quantities, a system called "bakers percentage" is used. Each ingredient is given as a percentage where flour usually represents 100%. This way recipes can be easily compared to each other with flour as the common ground between the two.

Take a look at these two recipes:

	Recipe 1	Recipe 2
Flour	100%	100%
Water	65%	74%
Olive oil	-	6%
Yeast	1%	1%
Salt	1.5%	1.5%

If all these figures where given as weights (and one recipe was portioned to produce significantly more) it might be difficult to compare the two recipes. However, because of the percentages it becomes easy to see that they both have a hydration of 65% and 74% respectively. This tells us recipe 1 is likely to be conventionally kneaded white yeasted bread and recipe 2 is likely to be some lighter bread with an airier crumb such as Ciabatta.

If we then wanted to make either of these recipes, this would be easy. Simply add up the percentages to get a total then divide the target weight by this figure to work out what "1%" means in terms of grams. This can then be multiplied by the percentage of each ingredient to get the weight of each for your target quantity.

\begin{matrix} 100 % + 65 % + 1 % + 1.5 % & = & 167.5 % \\ Total weight (%) & = & 167.5 % \\ Total weight (kg) & = & 10 kg \\ ∴ 1 % & \approx & 59.70 g \end{matrix}