Baker’s Percentage Explained

If you’ve ever tried to make a pizza, especially following one of my authentic Italian pizza recipes, you’ve likely encountered the term ‘hydration’ tossed around quite frequently, often expressed in percentages. But why is this so? In this guide, we are going to explore and dig into the foundational concepts of baker’s percentages and baker’s math. In a simple way, you are going to understand what the term hydration means and why all ingredients of a pizza recipe are calculated starting from the weight of the flour. Not only that, we’re also going to unravel the mystery behind these percentages and how a pizzaiolo prepares pizza recipes. All of this is the Italian Pizza Secrets Bakers’s percentage explained!

Understanding baker’s percentages is more than a technicality; it’s the key to unlocking consistently perfect pizza dough. This method, while seemingly complex, simplifies the art of baking into an approachable science. Whether you’re a home cook aspiring to recreate pizzeria-quality crusts or a budding pizza chef aiming to refine your skills, this guide is your first step towards achieving that dream crust.

I promise you that after the guide “Baker’s Percentage Explained” you will be mastering the pizza recipes with great ease.

What are Baker’s Percentages?

Also known as baker’s math, this is the standard method used to calculate the amount of ingredients you need for a recipe. At its core, this is the best way to make sure the dough making is easy to understand and most importantly replicate. This method is not about percentages in the traditional sense, but rather an approach to ingredient ratios. It starts with flour — the foundation of any baking recipe, especially pizza dough, and then is extended to other ingredients. In baker’s math, the total weight of the flour is always considered 100%. Every other ingredient is then measured as a percentage of that flour weight.

For example, in a pizza dough recipe, if your flour weighs 1000 grams (which represents 100%), and the recipe calls for 600 grams of water, then the water is 60% of the flour’s weight (600g ÷ 1000g × 100). Similarly, if you need 20 grams of salt, that’s 2% (20g ÷ 1000g × 100). This method allows for incredible precision and consistency, ensuring that your pizza dough has the same moisture, texture, and taste every time you make it.

The beauty of baker’s percentages lies in its scalability and adaptability. Whether you’re making enough dough for one pizza or fifty, the ratios remain constant, making it easy to adjust quantities without losing the balance of ingredients. This is particularly useful in pizza making, where consistency in the dough’s texture and flavor is paramount.

Understanding baker’s percentages is a game-changer for home cooks and professional chefs alike. It takes the guesswork out of baking, allowing you to focus on creativity and consistency of pizza making. Mastering this approach is a key element of pizza making. It will make super easy to understand a pizza recipe and the usage of calculators.

Why Use Grams in Baking?

Think of baking like building a Lego castle. To make it perfect, you need the right number and type of blocks. In baking, those blocks are ingredients like flour and water. We measure these ingredients to get our pizza dough just right.

In many places like the USA, people often use cups and spoons to measure. But cups and spoons can be tricky. Imagine trying to fill a cup with flour. One day you might pack it tight, and another day it might be loose. This means sometimes you have too much flour, and other times, not enough. This is like having different sized blocks each time you build your castle. It can make your pizza dough too hard or too soft. And this is particularly important in Italian pizza recipes making. Think at when we prepare a high hydration pizza dough: if we measured a lower amount of flour than what is needed we are calling for a disaster!

But, when we use grams, it’s like having blocks that are always the same size. Grams are a tiny weight, and they don’t change. A gram of flour in the USA is the same as a gram of flour in Italy, or anywhere else. This helps make sure our pizza dough comes out the same every time, no matter where we are.

Professional pizza makers all over the world agree on this. They always use grams to measure, because it’s like a secret recipe for the best pizza dough. It makes sure every pizza is exactly the same as the last. So, by using grams, we can bake like the pros and make our pizza dough just right!

Applying Baker’s Math to Pizza Dough

Baker’s math is like a special magic formula that helps us make all kinds of pizza dough. It is not rocket science but I understand that might be a bit overwhelming at the beginning. So, let’s see how we can use this magic to make three different pizza styles: Neapolitan pizza, a high hydration pizza dough and focaccia.

Neapolitan Pizza Dough

This is probably the most famous Italian pizza. I provided a full description about it in multiple articles and for the sake of this article I don’t think we need to describe it. If you arrived here but you were searching for an authentic Neapolitan pizza recipe you can read here. In general, for the traditional Neapolitan pizza we use lower hydration, meaning a bit less water.

Let’s jump in a specific example considering that we have 1000 grams of flour. We then use 600 grams of water (60% hydration), 3 grams of yeast (0.3%), and 20 grams of salt (2%). The final weight of our pizza dough will be 1623 grams. Of course later during the process we will prepare our pizza dough balls. If we did everything fine, this dough is stretchy but not too wet, perfect for making those classic round pizzas you can eat in the Naples city center.

High Hydration Pizza Dough

Differently than any other pizza recipe, this dough is super stretchy and makes a light, airy crust. In the past I was preparing high hydration pizza recipes very often using a stand mixer. During more recent time I prefer to use a spiral mixer for this pizza and very often I do it using a biga preferment. However using biga in a pizza recipe adds level of complexity in the baker math that are out of the scope of this article. So better to provide an example simply considering a classic high hydration pizza recipe using the direct method kneading.

Imagine we still start with 1000 grams of flour. But this time, we add more water, like 700 grams (70% hydration). We keep then yeast at 3% (30 grams) and salt 2% (20 grams). The final weight of the dough will be 1750 grams. At the end of the day the math is always the same.

Focaccia

To be honest Italian Focaccia is very often misunderstood or misinterpreted. It is not necessarily the type of bread-like food that you may expect. And it is not necessarily a high hydration dough. Actually is often the exact opposite. That is why I wanted to keep it as a third example.

We continue to use our standard 1000 grams of flour. This time we add 580 grams of water (58% hydration). Then we add 10 grams of yeast (1%), 20 grams of salt (2%) and 5 grams of malt (0.5%) . The final weight of this Italian focaccia will be 1625 grams.

In each of these recipes, baker’s math helps us get the right balance of flour, water, yeast, and salt. It’s important for making sure our pizza dough turns out just how we want it. So, whether you like your pizza crust thin and crispy or thick and soft, baker’s math is your best friend! Remember though that the ones provided above are just examples and I don’t recommend to use them to prepare a real recipe, unless you know what you are doing 🙂

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Using baker’s percentages for pizza dough is handy, but there are a few easy-to-make mistakes. Before exploring how to avoid them, it makes sense to clarify a concept that is often source of confusion. I am talking about the affirmation that in baker’s percentage flour is always considered 100%.

So, Why Flour is Always 100%? Well, it’s because flour is the base of our pizza dough. By making flour 100%, we can compare all other ingredients to it. This helps us understand how much of everything else we need. For example, if water is 60%, it means there’s a bit more than half as much water as there is flour. This makes changing the recipe size easy while keeping everything in balance. In other words, we could also say that the baker percentage is only valid when calculated having as a base the amount of flour we have at our disposal.

That said, here is how to avoid the most common mistakes of baker’s math.

Not Using a Scale: The key to baker’s percentages is accuracy. A big mistake is not using a scale for measuring. Cups and spoons can be inaccurate, but a scale gives you the exact amount of flour, water, and other ingredients. This helps you follow the recipe’s percentages just right.

Misreading the Percentages: It’s easy to get confused with the numbers. Remember, if a recipe says 60% water, it means 60 grams of water for every 100 grams of flour. Make sure your math is correct to get the right mix.

Advanced Tips and Variations

Why it is so important to learn to manage the baker’s percentage in pizza making? The answer is pretty simple: it will help you in tailoring a pizza recipe to your needs. Knowing how to easily calculate the amount of ingredients to use, will open tons of opportunities for you to change slightly recipes also provided by others.

For example, you can experiment with modifying the pizza dough hydration percentage and notice what are the differences in the final result. Or you may want to accelerate the proofing. In this case you can alter the amount of yeast of your pizza recipe. The world that the manipulation of percentage will open to you is close to infinite.

There still is a couple of challenges that you might experience. The first one is the case of usage of preferments like biga or poolish. In this case the baker percentage has to be adapted to the fact that you use part of the ingredients in the preferment. It’s not rocket science but again this will be a different way of preparing the recipe. The second challenge is to calculate the exact amount of pizza dough that you need and from there calculate the amount of ingredients with baker’s math. But no worries because in the coming weeks I am going to publish a google sheet that will help you. Feel free to drop me a mail if you are interested and I will add you in the waiting list.

Baker’s Math Exercise – practice the Baker’s percentage

Now that we covered deeply the topic thanks to our Baker’s Percentage Explained guide, I think it is important to give you the opportunity to practice. There is nothing better than making something practically to memorize it. So let me share a couple of examples for you to practice.

Exercise 1: the owner of the pizzeria where you are going to work asks you to prepare an authentic Neapolitan pizza recipe following the traditional way. As the expert of pizza making, you decide to work on a pizza dough that has 60% hydration, 3% of salt and 0,1% of fresh yeast. You are going to make a test of this recipe using 1Kg (or 1000 grams) of flour. How much water, salt and yeast are you going to use in your recipe?

Exercise 2: your kids are asking to eat the delicious Italian focaccia you tried in an Italian restaurant near you. You decide to try your own focaccia recipe and decide to have a 70% hydration focaccia dough. To speed up the proofing, you decide to use 2% of instant dry yeast. As the yeast is quite a lot and you just bought malt at super market, you are going to also add 0.5% of malt. Last ingredients is 2% of salt. Once again you are going to use 1000 grams of flour as your basic ingredient.

As you should know already, all calculations should start from the 1000 grams of flour. So you are going to add ingredients in your recipe according to the calculated percentage. If you are still unclear, go back to the previous paragraph where you find an example of the calculation! Then let me know your answer in the comments 😉

Conclusions

In conclusion, baker’s percentages might seem daunting at first, but with a bit of practice and understanding, they become an invaluable and straightforward tool in your pizza-making arsenal. I am confident that this article has provided you with the clear explanations and detailed insights needed to understand this essential concept fully. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced baker, mastering baker’s percentages is a step towards achieving consistently perfect pizza dough. So, equipped with this knowledge, you’re now ready to experiment, refine, and enjoy the process of creating delicious pizza with confidence and precision. Happy baking!