You find a formula that looks promising and it is written like this: flour 100%, water 65%, salt 2.5%, yeast 0.2%. There is no mention of how many pizzas it makes, no gram weights, and no explanation of why the numbers add up to more than a hundred.
That notation is baker's percentage, and it is worth twenty minutes of your time. It is the reason two formulas from different sources can be compared directly, the reason a formula scales cleanly from two balls to fifty, and the thing that turns a recipe you follow into a formula you understand.
The one rule
Flour is always 100%. Every other ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the flour weight.
That is the whole system. Everything else follows from it.
So in a formula with 1,000 g of flour:
| Ingredient | Percentage | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Flour | 100% | 1,000 g |
| Water | 65% | 650 g |
| Salt | 2.5% | 25 g |
| Yeast | 0.2% | 2 g |
The percentages total 167.7%, which looks wrong the first time you see it and is completely correct. They are not shares of the dough. They are ratios to the flour.
If a formula uses more than one flour, the flours together make up the 100%, and each is given as its own share of that total.
Reading a formula: worked example
Say you want to make dough using 700 g of flour, and the formula above.
- Flour is your reference: 700 g.
- Water at 65%: 700 × 0.65 = 455 g.
- Salt at 2.5%: 700 × 0.025 = 17.5 g.
- Yeast at 0.2%: 700 × 0.002 = 1.4 g.
Total dough weight: 700 + 455 + 17.5 + 1.4 = 1,173.9 g.
That last figure matters, because most of the time you are not starting from a flour weight. You are starting from how many pizzas you want.
Working backwards from how many pizzas you want
This is the direction you will actually use, and it is where most people get stuck.
You need two decisions first: how many balls, and how heavy each ball should be. Ball weight is a real variable that changes the finished pizza, and it varies by style and by the size you are baking to. Where a style has a documented convention it appears on that style's reference page with its source.
Then:
- Total dough weight = ball count × ball weight.
- Total percentage = add up every percentage in the formula, including the flour's 100%.
- Flour weight = total dough weight ÷ (total percentage ÷ 100).
- Every other ingredient = flour weight × its own percentage.
Worked through, for six balls at 250 g each using the formula above:
- Total dough weight = 6 × 250 = 1,500 g.
- Total percentage = 100 + 65 + 2.5 + 0.2 = 167.7%.
- Flour = 1,500 ÷ 1.677 = 894.5 g.
- Water = 894.5 × 0.65 = 581.4 g. Salt = 894.5 × 0.025 = 22.4 g. Yeast = 894.5 × 0.002 = 1.8 g.
Check: 894.5 + 581.4 + 22.4 + 1.8 = 1,500.1 g. The rounding is fine.
That is arithmetic you can do on a phone calculator in under a minute: total the percentages, divide the target dough weight by that total to get the flour weight, then multiply the flour weight by each percentage in turn. Write the percentages next to the gram weights so the notation stays visible rather than disappearing behind a result.
A note on loss
In practice you lose a little dough to the bowl, the bench, and your hands. Many bakers add a small overage to the total dough weight to compensate. How much depends on your handling and your batch size, so it is worth working out your own figure rather than adopting someone else's.
Writing your own formula from a recipe in grams
If you have a recipe you like that is written in weights, converting it lets you scale it and compare it to anything else.
Divide every ingredient by the flour weight, then multiply by 100.
A recipe with 500 g flour, 320 g water, 12 g salt and 1 g yeast becomes:
- Water: 320 ÷ 500 × 100 = 64%
- Salt: 12 ÷ 500 × 100 = 2.4%
- Yeast: 1 ÷ 500 × 100 = 0.2%
Now it is portable. You can scale it to any batch size, and you can hold it next to another formula and see immediately where they differ.
Where preferments complicate things
If your formula uses a poolish, biga, or any other preferment, the flour and water in the preferment count toward the totals for the whole formula. They are not separate.
The usual way to write this is to give the overall formula first, then state what proportion of the total flour goes into the preferment and at what hydration. Adding the preferment's flour and water on top of the main formula's percentages is a common error and it produces a dough at a hydration you did not intend.
Preferments and what each one is for are covered in poolish, biga, and direct dough.
Yeast is the percentage that does not scale linearly
Everything else in a formula scales cleanly. Yeast does not, in the sense that the right yeast percentage depends heavily on how long and how warm your fermentation is.
A yeast quantity appropriate for a same-day dough will over-ferment a three-day one at the same temperature. This is why copying a yeast percentage from a formula written for a different schedule is one of the more reliable ways to end up with slack, over-proofed dough.
Scale the flour, water, and salt with confidence. Treat the yeast percentage as belonging to the schedule rather than to the formula, and see how to choose a fermentation schedule.
Mistakes to avoid
Treating percentages as shares of the dough. They are ratios to flour. Totals over 100% are normal and correct.
Forgetting that ball weight is a separate decision. Hydration and ball weight are independent. Changing one does not change the other, and both affect the finished pizza.
Scaling yeast linearly across a schedule change. Covered above, and worth repeating because it is the most costly of these.
Adding the preferment on top of the main formula. It belongs inside the totals.
Measuring by volume. Cups of flour vary enough that a formula written in percentages becomes meaningless. A digital scale is the cheapest genuinely transformative purchase in pizza.
Ignoring bench flour. Flour added during shaping changes your actual hydration. If you use a lot, your record of the bake is wrong unless you note it.
Why this notation is worth learning
Three practical reasons.
Comparison. Two formulas written in percentages can be held side by side and the differences read off directly. Two recipes in grams for different batch sizes cannot.
Scaling. Cooking for twelve instead of four becomes arithmetic rather than guesswork.
Diagnosis. When you understand a formula as a set of ratios, you can change one deliberately and see what it did. That is the difference between following a recipe and running an experiment, and it is the whole basis of the four variables that decide your crust.
In Plain English
Baker's percentage is a notation where flour is always 100% and every other ingredient is written as a percentage of the flour weight. Totals above 100% are normal, because the percentages are ratios to flour rather than shares of the dough.
It is for anyone who has found a formula written in percentages and could not turn it into a shopping list, or who wants to scale a recipe they already like without guessing.
Use it whenever you want to compare two formulas, change batch size, or isolate a single variable across bakes. The direction you will use most is working backwards from ball count and ball weight to a flour weight, using the total-percentage figure.
Next step: take a recipe you already make, convert it to percentages, and write it in your bake log that way. From that point on it scales to any number of pizzas and can be compared to anything else you find.
Where to go next
- Read the full guide: the four numbers that decide your pizza crust
- To understand the water figure: pizza dough hydration explained
- For the minor ingredients: salt, oil, and sugar in pizza dough
- To record a formula alongside its conditions: the formula worksheet