Bread Recipe Calculator
Select your bread type, set the total dough weight, and this calculator will generate a complete recipe with precise ingredient weights using baker's percentages. Adjust hydration and flour blends to customize your loaf.
Flour Blend Mixer
Customize your flour blend by adjusting the percentages below. The total must equal 100%. Specialty flours affect gluten strength, hydration requirements, and flavor profile. The blend bar below shows your current mix visually.
Bulk Ferment Timer
Estimate your bulk fermentation time based on the leavening method and ambient temperature. Temperature is the single most important factor — even a few degrees dramatically change timing.
Bread Type Quick Reference
Standard baker's percentages for common bread styles. Hydration, salt, and yeast amounts are expressed as a percentage of total flour weight.
| Bread Type | Hydration | Salt | Yeast / Starter | Fat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sandwich Bread | 60-65% | 2% | 1.5% instant | 3-5% butter |
| Sourdough | 72-78% | 2% | 20% starter | None |
| Ciabatta | 80-85% | 2% | 1% instant | 2-3% olive oil |
| Bagels | 55-58% | 2% | 1% instant | None |
| Pizza Dough | 62-68% | 2.5% | 0.5% instant | 2-3% olive oil |
The Complete Guide to Bread Recipe Formulation
Bread baking is both an art and a science, and understanding how to formulate a recipe from scratch gives you the freedom to create exactly the loaf you want. Whether you are building a simple sandwich loaf for weekday toast or crafting a high-hydration ciabatta with an open, lacy crumb, the principles are the same: flour, water, salt, and leavening, combined in carefully balanced ratios.
Baker's Percentage: The Universal Language
Baker's percentage is the foundation of all bread formulation. In this system, every ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the total flour weight, with flour always set at 100 percent. This convention makes it trivially easy to scale a recipe up or down — if you know your percentages, you can calculate a recipe for one loaf or one hundred. A standard sourdough formula might read: flour 100 percent, water 75 percent, salt 2 percent, starter 20 percent. To make 900 grams of dough, you work backward from the total percentage (197 percent in this case) to find the flour weight, then multiply everything else accordingly.
This system also makes it easy to compare recipes. When someone says their ciabatta is at 85 percent hydration, you immediately know this is a very wet, challenging dough. When a bagel recipe calls for 56 percent hydration, you know the dough will be stiff, dense, and satisfyingly chewy. Baker's percentage transcends language barriers and recipe formats — it is used in bakeries from Tokyo to Paris to San Francisco.
Hydration: The Key to Crumb Structure
Hydration is arguably the single most important variable in determining the character of your bread. Low-hydration doughs in the 55 to 62 percent range produce tight, uniform crumbs ideal for slicing and toasting — think bagels, pretzels, and dense sandwich loaves. Medium hydration between 63 and 72 percent covers the vast middle ground of everyday breads: French bread, pain de mie, rolls, and standard country loaves. High hydration from 73 to 85 percent creates the open, irregular crumb prized in artisan breads like ciabatta, focaccia, and rustic sourdough.
Working with high-hydration doughs requires different techniques than standard bread making. You cannot knead a dough at 82 percent hydration on the counter the way you would a sandwich bread. Instead, bakers use stretch-and-fold techniques, coil folds, and lamination to build gluten strength gradually while preserving the delicate gas cell structure that creates those coveted large holes. The dough handling skills required for high-hydration baking are among the most rewarding to develop as a home baker.
Flour Selection and Blending
The type of flour you choose fundamentally shapes your bread. Bread flour, milled from hard red winter or spring wheat, contains 12 to 14 percent protein and develops strong, elastic gluten networks capable of trapping fermentation gases. All-purpose flour at 10 to 12 percent protein works for most breads but produces a slightly softer crumb. Whole wheat flour includes the bran and germ, adding fiber, flavor, and nutrition but also cutting through gluten strands with sharp bran particles — which is why 100 percent whole wheat breads are denser than white bread.
Rye flour contains different proteins than wheat (secalin and gluelin rather than glutenin and gliadin) that do not form the same elastic gluten network. Rye-heavy doughs rely on pentosans — starch-like molecules that absorb many times their weight in water — to provide structure. This is why traditional rye breads have a dense, moist, almost gummy crumb compared to wheat bread. For beginners experimenting with rye, keeping it below 20 to 30 percent of the total flour and pairing it with strong bread flour will yield the best results.
Spelt flour, an ancient relative of modern wheat, creates breads with a sweet, nutty flavor and tender crumb. Spelt gluten is more fragile than wheat gluten and breaks down quickly with overmixing, so gentle handling and reduced kneading times are essential. Einkorn, emmer, and kamut are other ancient grains gaining popularity in artisan baking, each bringing a distinctive flavor profile and nutritional characteristics to the finished loaf.
Leavening: Yeast vs. Sourdough Starter
Commercial yeast — whether instant, active dry, or fresh cake yeast — provides fast, reliable, and predictable leavening. Instant yeast at 1 to 2 percent of flour weight will raise a dough in 1 to 2 hours at room temperature. Active dry yeast requires proofing in warm water first and is used at slightly higher percentages (about 25 percent more than instant). Fresh cake yeast, used primarily by professional bakers, requires roughly three times the weight of instant yeast.
Sourdough starter introduces a complex ecosystem of wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria that produce carbon dioxide more slowly than commercial yeast but also generate organic acids (lactic and acetic) that contribute flavor complexity, improved shelf life, and health benefits including increased mineral bioavailability and reduced phytic acid. A typical sourdough inoculation of 15 to 25 percent by flour weight will produce a bulk fermentation time of 4 to 10 hours depending on temperature and starter activity. Many professional bakers use a preferment — a portion of the flour and water fermented with a small amount of yeast or starter hours or days before the final mix — to develop flavor while maintaining the convenience and speed of commercial yeast.
Salt: More Than Seasoning
Salt serves multiple critical functions in bread beyond flavor. It tightens the gluten network, making dough stronger and more elastic. It controls fermentation rate by inhibiting yeast activity — dough without salt ferments 30 to 50 percent faster and can easily over-proof. Salt also inhibits enzymatic activity that would otherwise break down the dough structure, and it contributes to crust color through its effect on the Maillard reaction. The standard salt percentage for bread is 1.8 to 2.2 percent of flour weight. Reducing salt below 1.5 percent produces noticeably bland bread with a weaker structure, while exceeding 2.5 percent makes bread taste overly salty and significantly slows fermentation.
Temperature Control: The Hidden Variable
Professional bakers obsess over dough temperature because it is the primary determinant of fermentation timing. The concept of Desired Dough Temperature (DDT) allows you to calculate exactly what water temperature to use to hit your target. For most bread, a DDT of 75 to 78 degrees Fahrenheit (24 to 26 degrees Celsius) produces a comfortable 3 to 4 hour bulk fermentation window. The formula is: water temperature equals DDT multiplied by the number of temperature factors, minus the sum of flour temperature, room temperature, and any friction factor from mixing. Controlling your DDT is the single biggest improvement you can make to your baking consistency.