Knead to Know #3: Baker's Percentages — The Language of Bread

Scaling all ingredients

Last week we got into gluten — what builds it, what limits it, and why every loaf has its own target. This week we're talking about the system professional bakers use to keep all of that under control.

Baker's percentages.

If you've ever tried to double a bread recipe and ended up with something weird, or wondered why two recipes with the "same" ingredients turn out completely different, this is the missing piece. Once you understand baker's percentages, you stop reading recipes and start reading formulas — and that's a whole different skill.

Flour Is Always 100%

Here's the entire system in one sentence: flour is always 100%, and every other ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the flour weight.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

A basic bread formula looks like this:

• Flour — 100%

• Water — 65%

• Salt — 2%

• Yeast — 1%

If you're making a loaf with 500g of flour, you do the math:

• Flour — 500g

• Water — 325g (500 × 0.65)

• Salt — 10g (500 × 0.02)

• Yeast — 5g (500 × 0.01)

Want to make ten loaves? Use 5,000g of flour and run the same percentages. Want to scale down to a small home batch? Same formula, smaller flour weight. The ratios stay locked.

This is why professional bakeries can run the same bread at 500g and 50,000g and get the same product. The formula doesn't change. Only the flour weight does.

Why Volume Measurements Fall Apart

Most home recipes use cups. Cups are the worst.

A cup of flour can weigh anywhere from 120g to 170g depending on how you scoop, whether the flour is sifted, how humid your kitchen is, and how packed the bag was when you opened it. That's a 40% swing on the most important ingredient in your bread. No wonder the loaf is different every time.

The flour itself matters too. A cup of whole wheat weighs more than a cup of AP. Bread flour, cake flour, rye, semolina — they all pack differently. So even if you measure perfectly with the same scoop and the same technique, switching flours changes the weight without changing the cup. The recipe doesn't tell you that.

Weight doesn't lie. 500g of flour is 500g of flour, in your kitchen or ours, on a Tuesday or in July. A decent kitchen scale runs under $20 and changes the way you bake forever. If you don't own one, that's the most useful tool you can buy this week.

What the Numbers Tell You

Once you can read a formula in baker's percentages, you can size up a bread before you ever mix it.

Hydration (water as % of flour). A baguette runs around 65%. A country loaf might be 75%. A high-hydration ciabatta or focaccia can push 80% or higher. Higher hydration means a more open crumb and a chewier bite, but the dough gets sticky and harder to handle. We'll get into this deeper next week — hydration is its own beast.

Salt. Almost always 1.8%–2.2%. Less than that and the bread tastes flat. More than that and you start slowing down the yeast and tightening the gluten too much. This range is remarkably consistent across just about every bread on the planet.

Yeast. 0.5%–2% for instant or active dry, depending on how fast you want fermentation to move. Sourdough swaps yeast for a percentage of starter — usually 15%–25%.

Fat. 0% in a lean bread like a baguette. 5%–10% in a soft sandwich loaf. Brioche pushes 50% or higher. The more fat, the softer and richer the crumb — and the more it works against gluten development (see last week's post).

Sugar. 0% in lean breads. 2%–5% in soft sandwich breads. 15%+ in enriched breads like cinnamon rolls and brioche. Sugar feeds the yeast at low levels and slows it down at high levels, which is why sweet doughs ferment differently than lean ones.

When someone hands you a formula, those five numbers tell you most of what the bread is going to be before you've touched a single ingredient.

Multiple Flours? Still Adds to 100%

Here's where it gets interesting. If your bread uses more than one flour — say bread flour and whole wheat — the total flour is still 100%. You just split it.

• Bread flour — 80%

• Whole wheat flour — 20%

• Water — 70%

• Salt — 2%

• Yeast — 1%

Total flour = 100%. The two flours together. Everything else is calculated off the combined flour weight. Same logic for adding rye, spelt, semolina, or any blend you want to play with.

This is how we think about formulas at the bakery. If a customer asks "can you do a loaf with more whole wheat?" we don't go hunting for a new recipe — we just shift the percentages. 70/30, 50/50, 100% whole wheat. The framework stays the same.

Converting Granny's Recipe

Got a recipe in cups you want to lock in? Here's the move:

1. Bake it once exactly as written, but weigh everything as you measure it. Write the weights down.

2. Take the flour weight and call it 100%.

3. Divide every other ingredient weight by the flour weight. That's its baker's percentage.

4. Now you have a formula you can scale, troubleshoot, and modify with intention.

Suddenly Granny's recipe stops being a guess. You can scale it up for a holiday, scale it down for one loaf, or tweak the hydration to make it more open without breaking it.

The Takeaway

Baker's percentages aren't math homework. They're a way of seeing bread that strips away the mystery. Once you know what the numbers mean, every formula becomes readable, every recipe becomes scalable, and every troubleshooting problem becomes solvable.

This is the language professional bakers use to talk to each other. There's no reason home bakers shouldn't use it too.

Next week we go deep on hydration — what changes when water goes from 60% to 80%, why the crumb opens up, and how to handle wet doughs without losing your mind.

See you then.

— Chef Keegan and

The Lakehouse Bakery Team