What is baker percentage and how does hydration work?

Baker percentage expresses every ingredient as a share of the flour weight, with flour fixed at one hundred percent. Hydration is simply the water weight divided by the flour weight times one hundred. A dough with 500 g flour and 350 g water is at seventy percent hydration. Because everything is relative to flour, you can scale a recipe up or down and the percentages stay identical.

What hydration should my bread be?

It depends on the loaf. Lower hydration around sixty to sixty-five percent gives a stiffer, easy-to-shape dough with a tighter crumb, typical of sandwich loaves. Medium hydration suits most everyday breads, and high hydration of seventy-five percent and above gives the open, airy crumb of ciabatta and rustic sourdough at the cost of a stickier, harder-to-handle dough.

How much salt should I add to bread dough?

Most bread recipes use around two percent salt by baker percentage, which is 2 g of salt per 100 g of flour. Salt controls fermentation speed, strengthens the gluten and, of course, seasons the loaf. The calculator defaults to two percent but lets you set your own figure if a recipe calls for more or less.

Can I scale a recipe with this?

Yes. Because everything is a percentage of flour, you just change the flour weight and every other quantity scales with it while the hydration and salt percentages stay the same. Enter the flour you want to bake with and the water, salt and total dough weight update instantly to match.

What is the Bread Hydration Calculator?

Calculate bread dough hydration and weights using baker percentages. Set your flour and target hydration to get the exact water and salt, or enter water to find the hydration. Runs entirely in your browser. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

Bread Hydration Calculator

Name: Bread Hydration Calculator
Creator: Gera Tools
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Get one useful tool a week

Like this tool? Enter your email and we'll send you one genuinely useful Gera tool a week — plus a link to come back to this one. No spam, one-click unsubscribe any time.

Speak the language of bakers

Serious bread recipes are written in baker percentages, where flour is always one hundred percent and water, salt and everything else are expressed relative to it. It sounds technical but it is the simplest possible way to describe a dough, because the numbers stay the same whether you bake one loaf or ten. This calculator turns those percentages into exact gram weights for your batch.

Hydration, both directions

Hydration is just water divided by flour, and it is the single number that most shapes how a dough behaves. Enter your flour and a target hydration to get the water weight, or flip it around and enter the water to discover the hydration you are actually working at. Either way the tool also applies your salt percentage and totals the whole dough weight, so you know exactly what will come out of the mixer.

From stiff to slack at a glance

The result comes with a plain-language read on the dough. Below about sixty-five percent you have a firm, easy-to-shape dough with a close crumb; in the mid-range you have a versatile everyday dough; and above seventy-five percent you are into wet, open-crumb territory that rewards good technique. It makes it easy to dial a recipe toward the texture you want before you ever touch the flour.