Bread Baking Calculator — Hydration & Quantities

Bread Baking Guide

What do I need to know about Baker's Percentages?

Professional bakers express all ingredients as percentages of the flour weight — this is baker's percentage. Flour is always 100%. Water = hydration% of flour weight. Salt = 1.8-2% of flour weight (typically 2g per 100g flour). Instant yeast = 0.5-1% of flour weight (0.5-1g per 100g flour). This system means recipes scale perfectly: a recipe calling for '65% hydration' means add 65g water per 100g flour regardless of batch size. It also allows direct comparison of recipes — a 70% hydration focaccia dough is noticeably wetter and stickier to handle than a 60% hydration sandwich loaf, regardless of the total batch size.

What should I know about Hydration and Dough Handling?

Low hydration (55-65%): firm, easy to handle, rolls and shapes easily. Good for bagels, pretzels, traditional sandwich bread. Medium hydration (65-75%): slightly sticky but manageable with floured hands and bench. Good crumb structure. Most everyday loaves. High hydration (75-85%): very sticky — requires wet hands or bench scraper technique, not flour (additional flour changes the recipe). Produces open, irregular crumb (ciabatta, sourdough tartine). Folding technique replaces kneading for high-hydration doughs, since they're too wet and slack to knead conventionally without sticking to everything.

What should I know about Yeast Conversion?

The three forms of yeast are not interchangeable by weight. Fresh yeast → active dry: multiply by 0.5. Fresh yeast → instant: multiply by 0.4. Active dry → instant: multiply by 0.75. A standard 7g sachet of instant yeast (the common UK packet size) leavens approximately 500g flour. Reducing yeast amount increases fermentation time — a long, slow rise at lower temperatures produces more flavour: use 0.1-0.2% instant yeast for a 12-18 hour room-temperature fermentation, or 0.5-1% for a 1-2 hour proof — less yeast and more time consistently produces better flavour than more yeast and less time.

What do I need to know about Baking Temperature and Steam?

Steam in the first 10-15 minutes of baking is crucial for bread crust. Steam prevents the crust from setting too early, allowing the loaf to spring and expand fully. Without steam: the crust sets quickly and the loaf cannot rise — producing a dense, tight crumb. Steam methods at home: place a baking tray in the bottom of the oven during preheating, pour boiling water in when you load the bread. Bake inside a preheated Dutch oven for the first 20 minutes (lid on), then remove lid. Professional deck ovens inject steam directly, which is what a Dutch oven or a tray of boiling water is attempting to replicate at home.

What should I know about Why Baker's Percentage Uses Flour as 100%?

Baker's percentage expresses every ingredient as a percentage of the total flour weight (flour is always defined as exactly 100%, regardless of how much flour is actually used), rather than as a percentage of the total dough or a fixed recipe quantity — this makes recipes infinitely scalable and easy to compare across different batch sizes, since the ratios stay identical whether making one loaf or fifty. A dough with 65% hydration, 2% salt, and 1% yeast means: for every 1000g of flour, use 650g water, 20g salt, and 10g yeast, and this exact same ratio set produces an identical dough whether scaled to 500g or 5kg of flour. This is fundamentally different from a standard recipe written as fixed quantities (e.g. '500g flour, 325g water'), and it's the reason professional bakers and serious home bakers increasingly work in baker's percentages — it separates the RECIPE (the ratios, which define the dough's character) from the BATCH SIZE (the actual quantities, which scale freely without needing to recalculate every ingredient from scratch).

What do I need to know about Hydration's Effect on Crumb Structure?

Hydration percentage (water weight as a percentage of flour weight) strongly influences the final bread's texture: low hydration (55-65%) produces a tighter, more uniform crumb typical of sandwich loaves and dinner rolls, easier to shape and handle since the dough is firmer; high hydration (75-85%+) produces the open, irregular, large-holed crumb structure prized in artisan sourdough and ciabatta, but the resulting dough is notably slacker, stickier, and harder to shape by hand, often requiring techniques like stretch-and-fold or working with wet hands rather than traditional kneading. This is why a beginner attempting a high-hydration artisan recipe often struggles more with handling than with the actual baking — the dough's workability, not just the final crust and crumb, changes dramatically across the hydration range, and most bread-baking skill development is really about learning to handle progressively wetter, less cooperative doughs confidently. Jumping straight from a 60% hydration recipe to an 80% one without building up gradually is a common source of frustration for home bakers.

What do I need to know about Scoring and Oven Spring in Bread Baking?

Scoring — cutting a pattern into the surface of a proofed loaf just before baking — serves a genuine structural purpose beyond decoration: it creates a controlled weak point for the dough to expand through during the early, high-heat phase of baking, known as oven spring, rather than the crust tearing randomly or restricting the loaf's rise. Oven spring happens because trapped gas inside the dough rapidly expands as the loaf heats, and because the dough's surface sets (forms a crust) within the first few minutes of high heat, that expansion needs somewhere controlled to escape — a scored loaf directs this expansion along the cut lines, producing the characteristic open 'ear' seen on well-scored artisan bread, while an unscored or poorly scored loaf under the same conditions often bursts unpredictably at a weak point in the crust instead. Scoring depth and angle both matter: a shallow, straight cut tends to simply open flatly, while a deeper cut made at a shallow angle (holding the blade close to horizontal relative to the dough's surface) is more likely to lift and curl into a pronounced ear as it expands. Scoring works best on dough with a well-developed surface tension from proper shaping, and on a loaf that's slightly under-proofed rather than fully or over-proofed, since there needs to be meaningful gas expansion still available for the scoring cuts to direct.

Worked Example: Full Recipe from 500g Flour at 70% Hydration

Starting from 500g flour at 70% hydration: water = 500 x 0.70 = 350g. Salt at a typical 2% of flour weight = 500 x 0.02 = 10g. Instant yeast at a typical 1% of flour weight for a same-day loaf = 500 x 0.01 = 5g. Total dough weight = 500 + 350 + 10 + 5 = 865g, which (allowing for roughly 10-12% weight loss from moisture evaporating during baking) typically yields a finished loaf in the region of 760-780g. This kind of baker's-percentage approach is what lets the same basic method scale smoothly from a small test loaf to a large batch simply by changing the flour weight and recalculating everything else proportionally.

Autolyse: Resting Flour and Water Before Mixing

An autolyse is a rest period, commonly 20-60 minutes, where flour and water are mixed together (without yeast or salt) and left before the rest of the ingredients and any kneading begin. During this rest, flour fully hydrates and enzymes already present in the flour start breaking down some of the starch and gluten-forming proteins, which in practice means the dough needs noticeably less active kneading afterwards to develop good gluten structure, and often produces a more extensible dough with improved crumb texture. Salt is traditionally held back until after the autolyse because it tightens gluten and slightly slows hydration if present from the start, and yeast is sometimes also held back so it doesn't start fermenting before the rest period is designed to end; this is a widely used technique in both home and professional bread baking, particularly for higher-hydration doughs that are otherwise harder to handle.

Why Salt Timing in Mixing Affects the Final Dough

Salt tightens and strengthens gluten, but added too early, directly onto flour before any water is mixed in, it can create uneven pockets of over-tightened gluten in spots where salt crystals sat before being evenly distributed. Dissolving salt into the mixing water, or adding it after an autolyse once flour and water are already combined, generally gives a more even result than sprinkling it directly onto dry flour. Salt also directly slows yeast activity at the point of contact, which is part of why bakers using a long autolyse often hold salt back until that rest period ends, so the enzymes doing useful work during the autolyse aren't slowed by salt's presence before they've finished.