Glossary
Baker's percentage
A way of writing a dough recipe where every ingredient is listed as a percentage of the flour weight, which makes recipes easy to scale.
Baker's percentage is a method of writing recipes where flour is always treated as 100 percent and every other ingredient, water, salt, yeast, oil, is listed as a percentage of that flour weight rather than as a fixed amount. A recipe written this way might read 100 percent flour, 65 percent water, 2.5 percent salt, 0.3 percent yeast, and it works at any batch size.
The format matters because it separates the recipe from any specific quantity. Once you know the percentages, you can scale a dough from two dough balls to twenty just by multiplying, and you can compare two different recipes side by side even if one was written for a small home batch and the other for a much larger one. It also makes it obvious which ingredient changes are actually meaningful, since a one percent shift in hydration is a real change while a one gram shift in a large batch is not.
To use baker's percentages you need a kitchen scale, since the whole system depends on weight rather than cups or spoons. A common mistake is trying to convert a percentage recipe to volume measurements, which introduces enough error that fermentation and texture become unpredictable. Using a dough calculator or scale keeps the math accurate and the results repeatable.