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Baker’s percentage
Baker’s percentage is a way to represent the ingredients of a recipe in relation to the amount of flour in the recipe. The flour is set at 100% and the ingredient weights (water, salt, yeast, sourdough starter, oil…etc) are divided by the flour weight to determine what percentage they are of the flour weight.
For example, 10 grams salt is divided by 500 grams flour = 0.02 or 2% salt in the following recipe. The baker’s percentages are given in parentheses next to the ingredient weights.
500g flour (100%)
350g water (70%)
100g sourdough starter (20%)
10g salt (2%)
Some bakers will further separate out the flour and water from a recipe’s sourdough starter, and add that flour and water to the total flour weight and water of the recipe. This is to say, they calculate baker’s percentages without the starter as a separate ingredient. Here is the recipe from above, recalculated this way:
500+50 = 550g flour (100%)
350+ 50 = 400g water (73%)
10g salt (1.8%)
Baker’s percentage