Baker's percentage

Baker's percentage is a system for writing recipes where flour is always treated as 100 percent, and every other ingredient, including water, salt and starter, is expressed as a percentage of that flour weight. It looks like a small shift from listing cups or plain grams, but it changes recipes from fixed instructions into ratios that can be scaled to any size loaf.

The advantage becomes clear the first time you want to double a recipe, switch from one loaf to two, or compare two recipes to see which uses more salt or a wetter dough. Because every number is tied back to the flour, you can recalculate a whole recipe for a different total dough weight just by multiplying, without redoing the math for each ingredient by hand.

To work in baker's percentages you need a scale accurate to at least one gram, since small ingredients like salt and starter are easy to get wrong at low weights. A common mistake is mixing percentage-based recipes with volume measurements like cups, which reintroduces the exact inconsistency the system is meant to remove. Once you are used to weighing everything, baker's percentage makes it far easier to troubleshoot a dough that feels too wet, too dry, or under-salted.