Understanding Bakers Percentages by Derek Hughes
You will often see or hear bakers referring to Percentages in their dough formulas and recipes, its well worth getting your head around these as it enables you to not only understand the values of the different ingredients but also their relative proportions to one another, it will also enable you to scale a given recipe up or down in size but still be the same recipe and retain those same proportions.
Firstly looking at any recipe we need to have a commonality and this is to weigh everything, and grams which is thankfully our standard measurement here in Australia. Too often we will see a recipe that is a mixture of grams, cups, tea spoons, table spoons, a pinch, millilitres, pints, quarts.
In Bakers Percentages “FLOUR” our Key ingredient is expressed as 100% all other ingredients are then directly related to that . If a recipe shows flour @ 500 grams it’s pretty easy to establish the value of 1% in this recipe being 5 grams (500 divided by 100 = 5), then moving through the recipe if our 2nd largest ingredient WATER is listed as 325g we can say that the hydration level is 65% (325 divided by 5 = 65) Salt @ 10g = 2%, butter @ 10g = 2%, yeast @ 5g =1%. This recipe would produce 850g of dough which is all well and good but perhaps we require 1500g of dough.
So this recipe which we might love and want to replicate but need a larger amount of dough has a total combined percentage value of 170 which is the Dough formula figure.
If we now use that formula figure against our desired amount of dough 1500g (1500 divided by 170) will give us the value of 1% for the larger recipe and for this one it is 8.823 g (round up/ down )
We now apply that figure to each ingredient
Flour (100%) is 882 grams
Water (65%) is 574 grams
Salt (2%) is 18 grams
Butter (2%) is 18 grams
Yeast (1%) is 9 grams
(170%) (1501g)
As a double check add all the ingredient weights and you should be close to the desired 1500g and the above figures come to 1501g.
I have quite a few recipes that were for large doughs that we made when I was at tech college and these can be reduced down to single loaf size or for a dozen buns.
Being able to look at a recipe and define its percentage values is a huge advantage in knowing if the recipe is good or way out.
