Dough ratios

Baker's percentage calculator

Paste the recipe. The ingredients on their own are enough. Savvy works out every ingredient as a percentage of the flour.

Free. No account. Nothing to install.

What it is

Every ingredient, as a percentage of the flour.

Baker’s percentages measure a recipe against its flour. The flour is 100%, and every other ingredient is its weight divided by the weight of the flour. A dough with 500 g of flour and 360 g of water has 72% water.

Two of those lines have names of their own. The water line is the dough’s hydration, and the salt line is its salt percentage. Both are read the same way as every other line.

The numbers matter because they describe the dough at any size. A dough at 72% hydration behaves the same whether it makes one loaf or ten.

How it is worked out

The flour is 100%. Everything else is measured against it.

Savvy finds the flour in every ingredient, adds it together, and divides each ingredient by that total. Where a recipe uses two flours, both are counted, and so is the flour inside a starter or levain. That flour is part of the 100%, so the flour line reads less than 100% beside a levain.

A worked example
  • 500 gbread flour91%
  • 360 gwater65%
  • 100 glevain, 100% hydration18%
  • 10 gfine sea salt2%

500 g + 50 g in the levain = 100% flour

Where it goes wrong

A cup of flour is not a weight.

Two people scooping the same cup can be forty grams apart, and forty grams of flour moves every percentage in the recipe. This is why the numbers are worth having from the recipe rather than from a rule of thumb.

Savvy converts what it can, and tells you where it could not.

What else to ask
What Savvy is

Every recipe you cook, in one place.

Savvy takes a recipe however it arrives — a link, a video, a photograph of a notebook page — and gives it back clean, weighed, and ready to scale. The numbers come out of the recipe, not out of a form.

See what Savvy does