Baker's percentage: the universal language of professional formulas

If you learn one thing before reading any other formula in this library, learn this. Baker's percentage is the notation professionals use to write, scale, compare and trouble-shoot every recipe — bread, cake, pastry and confectionery alike. Master it and a formula stops being a fixed recipe and becomes a model you can resize and adjust at will.

The one rule

In baker's percentage, the flour is always 100%, and every other ingredient is written as a percentage of the flour weight: divide the ingredient weight by the flour weight and multiply by 100 [c1]. Because everything is measured against flour rather than against the whole batch, the percentages add up to more than 100% — that grand total is called the total formula percent [c2]. This is the opposite of "true" or conventional percent, where all the ingredients sum to exactly 100% (see the comparison table and img-bakers-pct-anatomy).

Take the simplest professional dough:

| Ingredient | Baker's % | At 1 kg flour | |---|---|---| | Flour | 100% | 1000 g | | Water | 65% | 650 g | | Salt | 2% | 20 g | | Instant yeast | 1% | 10 g | | Total | 168% | 1680 g |

That is the full formula card formula-lean-white-bread. King Arthur writes the same lean loaf as 100 / 66 / 2 / 1.2, and BAKERpedia as 100 / 62 / 2 — all the same bread, tuned to the flour [c30].

Two small print rules matter from day one:

• Multiple flours still total 100% between them. A loaf that is 80% white and 20% wholemeal is written as two flour rows summing to 100% — never two separate 100% bases [c3].
• Salt is a percentage of FLOUR, not of the dough. 2% salt means 2% of the flour weight (the classic working window is 1.8–2.2%) [c6]. Figuring it on total dough weight is a common and bland-tasting mistake (see the fault table).

Hydration: the number that decides the crumb

Hydration = water weight ÷ flour weight × 100 [c4]. It is the single most important lever in bread. The same flour gives a tight, fine crumb at 60% and a wild, open crumb at 85% — and it does not stop at 100%: very wet batters run up to ~190% [c27]. The img-hydration-ladder graphic and the hydration table walk the whole range, from stiff bagel dough (~55%) through baguette (~65–72%) to ciabatta (72–85%) and pourable cake batter.

Use a flour strong enough to hold the water you pour in. Domson Bread Flour Type 750 carries ≥10% protein (~11.6 g/100 g) and ≥26% wet gluten [c10]; the fortified Type 550 runs 11.5–12.5% protein and 28–32% wet gluten [c11] — both ample for the formulas here.

Yeast: the same percentage, three different products

Yeast is dosed as a percentage of flour, so swapping yeast types means rescaling that percentage, not the recipe. Instant dried yeast sits at ~0.6–1.5% (≈1%) for lean dough [c7]; Fermipan Red is exactly this — an instant dried yeast for lean dough with 0–10% sugar, carrying 1% emulsifier (E491) and free of egg, soya and dairy [c9]. (Food-safety / allergen flag for human review: E491 sorbitan monostearate may be derived from animal tallow — professionals making vegetarian, vegan or halal claims on finished products must verify the source with Lallemand directly.) Fresh yeast is about 70% water, so you use roughly three times the instant weight for the same lift (≈3×) [c8]. The yeast-conversion table makes the switch routine.

Scaling: resize any formula in two steps

The total formula percent is also your scaling tool. To hit a target dough weight, divide that weight by the total formula percent (as a decimal) to get the flour weight; then multiply each percentage by that flour weight [c5] (img-scaling-factor). King Arthur's own worked example takes a 168.25%-total French bread and 150 lb of dough → 150 ÷ 1.6825 ≈ 0.9 → 90 lb flour [c5]. For our lean loaf: 5 kg of dough ÷ 1.68 ≈ 2976 g flour, and every other ingredient follows. (The dedicated scaling-and-yield dossier covers batch costing and the ingredients that do not scale linearly.)

Enriched dough: where the water hides

Enriched doughs look dry on paper but feel supple, because eggs are ~75% water, milk ~87% and butter ~16% (EU 82%-fat butter standard; US butter ≈18%) [c13]. The honest number is effective hydration — count the water inside those ingredients, not just the water you pour from a jug. Using King Arthur's professional brioche (formula-enriched-brioche: flour 100, egg 50, butter 50, sugar 12, salt 2.5, yeast 7, water 9; total 230.5%) [c15]:

egg 500 g × 0.75 + butter 500 g × 0.16 + added water 90 g = 545 g of water against 1000 g flour ≈ 55% effective hydration [c14].

So a brioche with only 9% added water is really a ~55%-hydration dough — which is why it handles and proofs the way it does (img-effective-hydration). Butter choice matters here: Polmlek Unsalted Butter 82% is min 82% fat and ~16% water, and is a milk allergen [c12]. Brioche butter typically runs 50–60% of flour (working range ~30–70%; a common three-tier classification puts 'basic' brioche at ≈20%, 'classic' at ≈50% and 'rich' at ≈88% of flour) [c16]. The 7% yeast is a fresh-yeast dose — sugar and fat slow fermentation, so a high dose is needed. If substituting osmotolerant instant yeast, use ≈2% (not 7% — applying the same percentage as instant would cause severe over-fermentation). (Human-review flag: confirm yeast type and the equivalent rate before production use [c15].)

Cakes: a "modified" baker's percentage with balance rules

Cakes keep flour at 100% but obey balance rules between structure (flour, egg) and tenderness (sugar, fat, liquid) [c17] (img-cake-balance-seesaw). The textbook balanced cake is the pound cake / quatre-quarts — equal weights of flour, butter, sugar and egg, i.e. 100% each, total 400% (formula-pound-cake) [c18]. Notice it satisfies the low-ratio rules automatically: sugar ÷ flour = 1 and fat ÷ egg = 1. (Note: Baking-Sense's professional pound-cake recipe runs sugar 125%, liquid 94%, eggs 106% — a modernised adaptation of the classical quatre-quarts; the formula card formula-pound-cake uses the classical equal-weight definition [c18][c19].) Push sugar above flour and you enter high-ratio territory, which needs extra liquid and emulsification to stay stable — Baking-Sense's vanilla layer runs sugar 133% / liquid 133% / eggs 73% versus Baking-Sense's adapted pound cake at sugar 125% / liquid 94% / eggs 106% [c19].

Beyond flour: choosing the 100% base

The real power of baker's percentage is that it generalises. When there is no flour, you simply make the dominant ingredient the 100% base (see the "beyond flour" table). For a ganache, chocolate is the base and cream is the percentage: a dark ganache is classically 1:1 (cream = 100% of chocolate) [c20]; milk chocolate ~1.5:1 and white ~2–2.5:1 are Callebaut's professional guidance (ratios vary across sources — some textbooks quote 2:1 for milk and 3:1 for white; treat these as starting points) [c20] (img-ganache-ratio-chart). The formula card formula-dark-ganache builds it with real couverture — Zeelandia Arabesque Dark 58% (temper: melt 47°C, cool two-thirds to 27°C, work at 30°C) [c23] or Barima Dark 72% (min 72% cocoa solids, min 43% fat) [c24] — plus glucose and a butter finish. Callebaut's framed confectionery ganache shows the same notation at production scale: 49.9% dark / 26.9% cream / 8.8% glucose / 8.8% invert / 3.8% clarified butter / 1.5% cocoa butter / 0.2% salt [c21].

Food-safety flag (human review): ganache is a perishable emulsion whose keeping quality is governed by water activity, lowered by invert sugar, glucose/sorbitol and a higher chocolate ratio [c22]. The full water-activity and shelf-life treatment lives in the chocolate & confectionery formulas dossier — here it is only the teaching example for a non-flour base.

The same logic reads a complete (premixed) product, where the mix itself is 100%: a Zeelandia chocolate-cake-mix sheet directs 1000 g mix : 200 g egg : 130 g oil : 200 g water, baked 180°C for 30–35 min [c29].

Preferments: a second percentage to track

Preferments add one more baker's-percentage idea: pre-fermented flour percentage = flour in the preferment ÷ total formula flour [c26]. A poolish is a 100%-hydration preferment (equal flour and water) with a small yeast dose — typically 0.25% of the preferment flour for a standard 12–16 h cool ferment (extended, very-cool ferments can use as little as 0.1%) — fermented 8–16 h [c25]. The card formula-poolish-preferment builds a baguette dough where 300 g of the 1000 g total flour (i.e. 30% pre-fermented flour) ripens overnight, then folds into a 68%-hydration final dough. A typical professional starting range is 20–40% [c26]; the dedicated preferment dossier covers poolish, biga, pâte fermentée and levain in full.

The five formula cards

All five are written in baker's percentage with arithmetic-verified totals, hydration and yields (see data.json):

1. formula-lean-white-bread — the canonical four-ingredient lean loaf (total 168%, 65% hydration), illustrated by img-lean-loaf-finished.
2. formula-enriched-brioche — effective hydration with eggs and butter (total 230.5%, ~55% effective), illustrated by img-brioche-finished.
3. formula-pound-cake — modified baker's percentage and balance rules (1:1:1:1, total 400%).
4. formula-dark-ganache — chocolate as the 100% base (1:1 dark, total 220%), illustrated by img-ganache-finished.
5. formula-poolish-preferment — the pre-fermented flour metric (30% poolish, 68% overall).

Buying the ingredients

Every formula maps to catalogue products (see linked_products in data.json): Domson Bread Flour Type 750 and Type 550 as the flour base; Fermipan Red (instant) or Benevia (fresh) yeast; Polish Fine Iodized Salt and Granulated Sugar; Polmlek Unsalted Butter 82%; Milk Łaciate 3.2% and Double Cream Bieruńska 33%; Glucose Syrup; and Zeelandia Arabesque Dark 58% or Barima Dark 72% couverture. The Zeelandia Optimax Free improver appears as an example of a small-percentage functional addition (~1.7% on flour) [c28].

General food-safety note (human review): raw flour is not ready-to-eat — all the wheat and rye flours here declare gluten and must be heat-treated before consumption [c31]; the enriched and cake formulas contain egg and milk/butter allergens, and the couvertures carry soya and may contain milk [c12][c23][c24].