Baking Percentages: I Was Told There Would Be No Math

Time to scale things down...

It was an odd thing to discover while researching my bread post, that there is apparently a whole formula that is dedicated just to bread. It is by no means magical, it’s just a trick bakers use to figure out the proportions of a bread recipe. Yet how many of you outside of a bread making book heard of it? I sure hadn’t and I’ve been baking my whole life though the focus was just on sweets and soda breads. So what is this formula and how do we take advantage of it? That is what we are going to explore today.

So, what is the formula? It is as follows:

Okay, so what does that mean? First off, these are all percentages based on weight rather than the standard volume that we are used to when baking. These percentages are a percentage of the weight of the flour. For example, water being 65% means that if you multiply the weight of the flour by .65, you get the weight of the water you need to add. Not too hard to understand, right? Now you can reverse this too, by divided the weight of the water by the weight of the flour, you can get an idea of what baker's percentages they are.

Now, you can tell by now that the totals of these percentages are over 100%, which is known as the “formula percentage”. You can get the actual percentage of how much of what ingredient is in the recipe by using this formula to get a “true percentage”:

As you can see, these numbers can tell you a lot about the recipe. For one, you can learn about the consistency of the recipe (is it a dry bread? Super moist? Sweet or salty) and figure out if you’ll like the recipe from that information. Also if you need to modify the recipe by a single ingredient you can do it in a way that won’t mess with the other ingredients. Not to mention it makes it easy to scale for different batch sizes. However, there is a few downsides too. The biggest is that most people don’t have a kitchen scale, so it is rather hard to measure by weight. Also it runs into issues when it comes to salt or yeast amounts as they are super small in most recipes unless you’re doing huge batches.

Besides these downsides, however, I think I will be starting to use this method for my next yeast bread. What about you? Will you start to use this yourself for future bread methods? Do you own a scale? We have a little white one that you can see in the picture, it’s rather nice but not very accurate like an electronic one would be. Let me know in the comments below, check me out on twitter if you haven’t yet and I will see you next Horror Tuesday.