Fundamentals
Baker's percentages
What do the percentages in a pizza dough formula mean, and how do I turn them into grams?
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Short answer
Baker's percentages express each ingredient as a share of the flour weight, so flour is always 100% and 62% water means 62 g of water for every 100 g of flour. Because everything is measured against flour rather than against the total, the percentages add up to well over 100%, and that is expected.
Why flour is the reference
Flour is the ingredient every dough has, and it is usually the largest by weight, so bakers use it as the fixed reference. Every other ingredient is divided by the flour weight and multiplied by 100. A dough made with 1,000 g of flour and 650 g of water is therefore a 65% hydration dough, whatever else is in it.
The practical benefit is that the ratio stays the same however much dough you make. A formula written for one ball and a formula written for forty are the same formula; only the flour weight changes. It also means two recipes can be compared directly: a 58% dough and a 70% dough tell you something about handling and texture before you have mixed either.
How to read a formula
A typical pizza formula reads something like: flour 100%, water 62%, salt 2.8%, instant yeast 0.2%. Read each line as 'this many grams per 100 g of flour'. Water at 62% is the dough's hydration; salt at 2.8% and yeast at 0.2% are small numbers because they are small quantities relative to the flour.
If a formula uses more than one flour, the flours together make 100% — for example 80% type 00 and 20% wholemeal. If it uses a preferment such as a poolish or biga, check whether the percentages describe the final mix only or the whole dough. King Arthur's professional reference recommends expressing the whole dough ('overall' baker's percentages), with the preferment's flour and water folded into the totals, because the final-mix numbers on their own can look misleading.
From a target dough weight to a flour weight
Most people start from how much dough they need — so many balls of a given weight — rather than from a flour weight. To work back, add all the percentages together and divide the total dough weight by that sum expressed as a multiplier: flour = total dough ÷ (sum of percentages ÷ 100). Since flour is always 100%, this is the same as flour = total dough ÷ (1 + sum of the other percentages ÷ 100).
Once you have the flour weight, every other ingredient is simply flour × its percentage ÷ 100. Small quantities such as yeast are worth weighing on a scale that reads to 0.1 g, or measuring by making a larger batch, because rounding 1.2 g to 1 g is a large relative change. In practice a little dough is lost to the bowl and bench, so many bakers add a few per cent to the target total.
Worked example: Four 250 g balls at 62% hydration, 2.8% salt and 0.2% instant yeast
- Total dough needed: 4 × 250 g = 1,000 g.
- Add the percentages: 100 (flour) + 62 (water) + 2.8 (salt) + 0.2 (yeast) = 165%, which as a multiplier is 1.65.
- Flour = 1,000 g ÷ 1.65 = 606.06 g, so about 606 g.
- Water = 606.06 g × 0.62 = 375.76 g, so about 376 g.
- Salt = 606.06 g × 0.028 = 16.97 g, so about 17 g.
- Instant yeast = 606.06 g × 0.002 = 1.21 g, so about 1.2 g.
- Check: 606.06 + 375.76 + 16.97 + 1.21 = 1,000.00 g. With the rounded figures (606 + 376 + 17 + 1.2) the total is 1,000.2 g.
Expect to finish slightly under 1,000 g of usable dough because some sticks to the bowl and hands; scaling the total up by a few per cent is a common allowance.
Common misconceptions
- “The percentages in a formula should add up to 100.”
- They never do. Flour alone is 100%, and every other ingredient is added on top, so a basic pizza dough usually totals somewhere around 160–175%.
- “62% hydration means water is 62% of the dough.”
- It means water is 62% of the flour weight. As a share of the total dough in the worked example, water is only about 38%.
- “Baker's percentages work just as well with cups and spoons.”
- They are weight ratios. Volume measures of flour vary considerably with how the cup is filled, so converting a percentage formula to cups reintroduces the imprecision the system exists to remove.
What this page cannot tell you
Baker's percentages describe proportions, not method. Two doughs with identical percentages can behave very differently depending on flour, mixing, temperature and fermentation time, and the arithmetic here says nothing about whether a formula is a good one for a given style or oven.
Related
Tools
Preferments
Evidence
Well established- Baker's Percentage — King Arthur Baking Company
- Modernist Pizza — The Cooking Lab