Have you ever wanted to make a larger or smaller batch of pizza dough without changing the recipe? Or wondered how professional pizza makers consistently reproduce the same dough?

The answer is Baker’s Percentage — a simple method of expressing every ingredient in a dough recipe as a percentage of the flour weight.

Unlike measuring ingredients with cups and spoons, weighing ingredients in grams provides much better consistency. Once you understand Baker’s Percentage, you can easily adjust hydration, salt, yeast, oil, and other ingredients while scaling the recipe to almost any amount of dough.

It may sound technical, but the basic concept is very simple

Understand Baker’s Percentage

When you’re making pizza dough (or bread for that matter), it’s not quite the amounts of ingredients that give you good or bad results, but having the right ratio of flour to water, to yeast and so on. Bakers’ Percentage is all about ratios of ingredients by weight not volume (including the liquid!).

The weight of flour you need is considered to be 100%, and all the other ingredients are expressed as a percentage of that. (If you are mixing different kinds of flour, add up all the flour weights and use that as your 100%)  Of course, your total ingredients will add up to more than 100% (unlike regular percentages). Just don’t worry about that.

I like using the metric system weight measurement for this purpose.  It is more precise and less confusing than the weight and measurement system we ordinarily use in the United States.   In the metric system, units of weight and measure are based in increments of 10.

So if your recipe calls for 50% water (what bakers call 50% hydration), that just means you use half as much water as flour. Starting with 200 grams of flour, for example, you then add 100 grams of water, meaning 100 ml (One milliliter of water weights one gram). So far, so good.

Now what if you need to add 3% salt? How much is that. If 100% = 200 grams, 3% = how much?

Here’s the easy way to do it: Figure out what is 1% of your flour weight, and just multiply by the percentages for all the other ingredients.

In our example,

1% of 200 grams = 200/100 = 2 grams.

3% salt is then: 2 x 3 = 6 grams, of salt.

2% yeast means 2 x 2 = 4 grams, of yeast.

Do the same for your other ingredients, weigh them up on a scale and mix as instructed. Congratulations! You’ve just mastered Bakers’ Percentage, and the secret to precise and consistent pizza dough is yours.

Note: I prefer a 260 g dough ball for a thin pizza on the 14.39-inch Mighty Pizza Stone. For a thicker crust, I typically use a 275 g dough ball. You can adjust the dough-ball weight depending on the size of your baking stone and how thick you prefer your pizza.

It is also easy to prepare a specific amount of pizza dough from a recipe expressed in Baker’s Percentage. For example, if you want to make three 260 g dough balls, you will need a total of 780 g of dough.

Based on the following recipe.

Ingredient	Baker’s Percent Formula
Flour	100%
Water	62%
Yeast	0.5%
Salt	3%
Oil	2%
Sugar	0%

You first add up all the percentages: 100 + 2 +3 + 0 + 0.5 + 62 = 167.5

Then you divide your desired dough weight by the total (167.5), to find the weight of 1%.

1% = 780/167.5 = 4.67 g. (remember this is 1% of the weight flour you need, not of the total weight)

Now just multiply the percentages for each ingredient by 4.67 and round to the nearest 0.01 of a gram, and you will get the precise weight of each ingredient you need to use, as in the following table.

Ingredient	Baker’s Percent Formula
Flour	465.67 g
Water	288.72 g
Yeast	2.33 g
Salt	13.97 g
Oil	9.31 g
Sugar	0 g

Simply weigh your ingredients, mix as instructed, and you’ll get your 780g of pizza dough, following the recipe exactly.