Baker percentage

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Baker percentage is a way of indicating the proportion of ingredients when making bread. Contrary to the usual way of expressing percentages, the total does not add up to 100.

All the ingredients are measured by their weight compared to the flour's. Thus, the flour accounts always for 100% and all the other ingredients make the total higher than 100. For example, if a recipe calls for 10 pounds of flour and 5 pounds of water, the corresponding percentages will be 100% and 50%.

Contents

1 Advantages
2 Example
3 Conversions
4 External links

Advantages

The main advantage of this formulation is that it allows bakers to resize a recipe easily. With a percentage formula for a bread recipe, it becomes exceedingly easy to make the same batch of bread for 2 loaves as it is for 50 loaves, with a bit of simple math. Common formulations for bread include 100% flour, 60% water/liquid, 1% yeast 2% salt, and 1% oil, lard, or butter.

Moreover, bread recipes are better done this way than by volume measurements (for example, by using cups) especially in large batches, because measurements by weight are very precise, while measurements by volume can actually vary a good amount, depending on how the flour is packed into the measuring cup, how the flour is ground, etc...

Example

A recipe could call for the following ingredients:

100% flour

35% water

35% milk

4% fresh yeast

1.8% salt

If the baker chooses to use 2 lb of flour, the recipe would call for

2.0 lb flour

0.7 lb water (or 11.2 oz)

0.7 lb milk (or 11.2 oz)

0.08 lb fresh yeast (or 1.28 oz)

0.036 lb salt (or 0.577 oz)

Conversions

The use of customary U.S. units can sometimes be awkward and the metric system makes these conversions even simpler. However, adaptation of the recipes can be done with the following densities approximations. Returning to volume units makes the measurements less precise.

1 lb of flour is approximately 3 3/4 cups

1 cup of water weighs approximately 1/2 pound (a U.S. gallon is 8.34 lb, a liter is 1.00 kg)

1 lb of flour is typical for a normal household yeast bread recipe

60% amount of water for 1 lb of flour is 1 1/2 cups and a tablespoon.

External links

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