Baker’s percentages
One common language for every dough sizeFlour is always 100 percent.
Baker’s percentages do not describe a share of the finished dough. They relate every ingredient to the total flour, keeping a formula unchanged when it is scaled.
Baker’s percentage of an ingredientIngredient weight ÷ flour weight × 100
20 g salt with 1,000 g flour equals 2% salt.
A complete example
Flour1,000 g100%
Water650 g65%
Salt28 g2.8%
Fresh yeast1 g0.1%
The complete dough weighs 1,679 g, so these percentages do not add up to 100. They stay the same when the formula is halved or recalculated for a larger batch.
Placing sourdough in the formula
At pizzamadre, the sourdough flour share states how much of the total flour is fermented in the sourdough. At 20%, a formula with 1,000 g total flour contains 200 g flour in the sourdough. Its water depends on the sourdough hydration and is deducted from the water in the final dough.
From percentages to grams
When total dough weight is fixed, flour weight is initially unknown. The calculator includes all ingredient percentages, determines the total flour and then distributes water, salt and leavening.