
Eg my 2 eggs weigh 100 gr, I need a hydration of 60% (600 ml) so I add 500 ml of water to the eggs to make them up to 600 ml. The eggs are cracked, weighed and water added to make the amount of liquid required. The weight of these and water make up the hydration required. In my recipe for a sweet dough, I use 2 eggs per kilo of flour. A hot cross bun recipe might have 20 gr spice (2%) and 60 gr candied peel (6%). If your bread recipe has additional ingredients, for example spices or fruit, these would also be expressed as percentages. So, for a kilo of flour the weights would be: In a recipe, all the ingredients are expressed as a percentage of the flour, so a little different to standard percentages! Baker’s percentages also work with sourdough too!. So always weigh rather than guess.Īs a small test just see how much your teaspoon of whatever ingredient actually weighs. You can use millilitres and grams interchangeably. This is where you need to use metric measurements when weighing your dough not imperial pounds and ounces. Adding an egg that weighs 50 gr will give different results to one that weighs 60 gr. For example, if a recipe calls for a teaspoon of an ingredient are all teaspoons the same? Is it heaped or flat? Even graded eggs weigh different amounts. It’s always better to weigh ingredients for accuracy. Why weighing ingredients makes sense Scored bread ready for the oven An artisan baker may describe her white loaf as having 72% hydration or her wholemeal bread 75% hydration. Wholemeal flour typically requires more water or hydration than white. I say liquid as it might actually be water and oil or eggs if it is a sweet recipe. When making bread, it is expression of the amount of liquid you add to a particular flour to make a dough. Hydration is “the process of causing something to absorb water”. It’s all about hydration – the amount of liquid in your dough It took me a while, but now I wouldn’t be without them.

I hope I’ve not already lost you with thought of maths. There are some slightly different ways described by bakers that you might come across, but I think this is the easiest one to get to grips with. I’m sharing the baker’s percentages rules I learnt in France. After all, you may find the flour you use needs a different amount of liquid than the standard recipe. You then use these percentages to work out your recipe precisely for set number of loaves of bread or to create your own particular recipe. It’s a neat way of expressing the proportions of flour, liquid, yeast and salt in your recipe.
#Bread bakers percentages professional
Using baker’s percentages will ensure your dough is consistentīakers’ Percentages are used by most professional bakers. Why was this easy way of expressing the ingredients in a bread recipe kept secret from the casual baker? In the latest in my series, Bake Better Bread, I discuss one of the trickier topics to describe but one that will transform your baking.

When I first learnt about Baker’s percentages, I wondered why on earth I hadn’t heard of it before. Some countries are more concerned with sodium in the diet and the customary amounts of salt range from 1 to 1.Baker’s Percentages will make your bread consistent If you use much less and the bread will be too bland for most tastes and yeast will tend to over rise. If you use much more, the salt taste is too obvious. For most breads in the United States, the percentage of salt is about 2%.

German bakers refer to the amount of water as "dough yield" and their texts make it plain that "dough yield" is where their profit margin lies.

In bakers percentages all the flour in a formula, or recipe, is arbitrarily defined as being 100%, and all the other ingredients are expressed as a percentage of that.įor example, if there are 1,000 grams of flour in a batch of bread and 650 grams of water, we say there is 100% flour and 65% water. Baker's percentage is one of the most powerful tools bakers have in their arsenal to help them understand how dough works.
