Make Your Homemade Bread a Baker Percentage Game
The pandemic-triggered home fever has spurred a sourdough baking craze that is similar to everyone on Instagram. If you are one of the newly converted bakers, then by now you have probably already learned how to feed your snack, as well as mastered some basic molding techniques and are eager for new challenges. Why not try customizing a custom loaf recipe? In my humble opinion, this is the perfect time to get comfortable with baker percentages, an essential tool in any budding baker’s arsenal.
There are dozens and dozens of baker percentage guides out there, but too many are too complex or difficult for even me to understand – and have been using them for over a decade. The concept is not complicated in the least: a bread recipe in which each ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the total flour. To do this, take the weight of the ingredient (always use weight, never use volume – so you’ll need a good scale), divide by the weight of the flour, and multiply that number by 100. Repeat this for everything except flour. ingredient. Made.
The easiest way to understand this is with an example. To begin with, I will translate the volumes of ingredients of my favorite peasant bread without kneading into weights:
- 3 cups (375 g) all-purpose flour
- 1 1/2 teaspoons (about 6 grams) instant yeast
- 1 1/2 teaspoons (about 9 grams) table salt
- 1 1/2 teaspoons (about 6 grams) granulated sugar
- 1 1/4 cups (275 grams) warm water (90-100 º F)
(For a quick and accurate volume to weight conversion, just Google how much a teaspoon or cup of each ingredient weighs; this is what I did here for yeast, salt, and sugar.)
Most bakers start with a percentage of water called “percent hydration” or “percent hydration.” This is how this calculation looks for a recipe for peasant bread:
275 grams of water ÷ 375 grams of flour = 0.73
0.73 x 100 = 73% hydration
Do the same for the rest of the ingredients and you will get the following list:
- 73% hydration
- 2% salt
- 2% sugar
- 1% yeast
There are several good reasons to use percentages instead of individual measurements, starting with recipe scaling. Baker percentages apply to any amount of flour; If you want to bake a double batch of peasant bread – which I do all the time – double the weight to 750 grams of flour and continue working in the opposite direction. Another huge benefit: Over time, you get so used to thinking in percentages that you can predict how the dough will behave even before you mix it.
To explain what I mean, let’s look at the ratio of ingredients in two other bread recipes from Lifehacker:
- Filled pizza dough : 69% hydration ( good ), 8% olive oil, 3% salt, 2% sugar, 1% yeast.
- Bread without kneading at night : 95% hydration, 2% salt, 0.5% yeast.
These numbers tell you almost everything you need to know about a given recipe. The more water the dough contains, the more sticky and wetter it is when kneading and the less kneading is required. Lower proportions of yeast require a longer rise time, which usually results in a more pronounced flavor in the fermented product. Sugar promotes fermentation to some extent, but suppresses yeast in large amounts, especially when combined with salt and fat. Looking at the numbers above, you begin to understand why overnight dough is darker and takes longer to rise than any other.
Scaling up and developing your instincts is great, but I think the best argument for baker percentages is that they can ultimately free you from the constraints of recipes altogether. They provide the basis for a systematic and reproducible change in one of the only variables you can control – the proportions of the ingredients in the dough. If your bread is too dense, increasing the hydration percentage the next time can promote gluten formation; if it rises and collapses too quickly in the oven, try decreasing hydration and / or yeast. Take notes and repeat.
As you hone your instincts for handling the dough, you will get a feel for what percentages you can change and by how much. You may not have much to say about the temperature or humidity in your kitchen, but by strategically manipulating your ingredients, you end up with the perfect baked product. Until then, don’t be afraid to experiment – based on the percentage of bakers.