Enter your flour weight, pick a hydration percentage and a yeast type, and get the water, salt and yeast amounts using true baker's percentages — in grams, kilograms, ounces or pounds. Sugar is optional: plain lean bread needs none, since yeast feeds on sugars already in the flour.
Baker's percentage treats flour weight as a fixed 100% and expresses every other ingredient as a percentage of that flour weight, not of the total dough. That's the opposite of how most home-cook recipes are written, but it's what lets a formula scale cleanly from a single test loaf to a full batch — double the flour and every other ingredient doubles right along with it, with no separate scaling step.
Hydration is simply water weight as a percentage of flour weight. A 65% hydration dough with 500g of flour needs 325g of water. Lower hydration (60–65%) produces a firmer, easier-to-shape dough; higher hydration (70%+) produces a more open crumb but a stickier, harder-to-handle dough that needs stronger gluten development to hold its structure.
Yeast and salt percentages are small on purpose: yeast in the 1–3% range depending on type, salt around 1.8–2.2%. Both directly affect fermentation speed — more yeast or less salt speeds it up, less yeast or more salt slows it down — which is why professional formulas specify them precisely rather than as a rounded spoon measurement.
It's a way of writing a bread formula where every ingredient is a percentage of the total flour weight, which is always treated as 100% — even when a recipe blends two flours. A 65% hydration dough means the water weighs 65% of whatever the flour weighs, whether that's 300g or 3kg, which is what makes the formula scale cleanly to any batch size.
60–65% gives a firm, easy-to-shape dough good for sandwich loaves and beginners. 70–75% gives a more open, airy crumb typical of artisan and sourdough-style loaves but is stickier to handle. Very wet doughs above 80% (ciabatta-style) need stronger gluten development and a more hands-off shaping technique.
Instant yeast is the most concentrated and active by weight, so it's typically used around 1% of flour weight. Active dry yeast is roughly 25% less potent gram-for-gram, so it's used a little higher, around 1.25%. Fresh (compressed) yeast is the least concentrated of the three and is typically used around 3% of flour weight.
A fixed "1 teaspoon of salt" makes no sense across a 300g loaf and a 3kg batch — the dough would taste wildly different. Around 1.8–2.2% of flour weight is the standard range that seasons the dough correctly and helps control fermentation speed, regardless of how much flour you're using.
No. Commercial yeast doesn't need added sugar to get going — enzymes already in the flour break down its starches into sugars the yeast can feed on, which is why plain lean bread (just flour, water, salt and yeast) rises fine with 0% sugar. Sugar is only added deliberately for enriched or sweet doughs, where it's there for flavour, tenderness and browning, and a modest amount can give a small early boost to fermentation — but too much actually slows yeast down by drawing water out of the cells, so more isn't better.
