Hydration Level
🧫 Starter Breakdown
Gear Up for Better Baking
The right tools make a real difference — from a good digital scale to a quality dutch oven.
Enter your original recipe and a new target flour weight to scale everything proportionally.
What Is Bread Hydration?
Hydration is the ratio of water to flour in a bread recipe, expressed as a percentage using baker's math. A recipe with 500g flour and 375g water has 75% hydration (375 ÷ 500 × 100).
Higher hydration creates a more open, irregular crumb and chewier texture — but makes the dough harder to handle. Lower hydration is easier to shape but produces a denser loaf.
Hydration Guide by Bread Type
| Hydration | Bread Type | Dough Feel |
|---|---|---|
| 55–65% | Bagels, pretzels, sandwich loaves | Stiff, easy to shape |
| 65–72% | Beginner sourdough, baguettes | Smooth, workable |
| 72–80% | Classic sourdough, country loaves | Slightly sticky, needs technique |
| 80–88% | Ciabatta, rustic sourdough | Slack, requires folds not kneading |
| 88%+ | Focaccia, pan loaves | Very wet, poured into pan |
Baker's Percentages Explained
In baker's math, flour always equals 100%. Every other ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the total flour weight. This makes it easy to scale recipes up or down without changing ratios.
- Flour: always 100%
- Water: your target hydration %
- Salt: typically 1.8–2.2%
- Starter/levain: typically 10–25%
Sourdough Starter in the Hydration Formula
This trips up many bakers: your starter contributes both flour and water to the dough. A 100% hydration starter is half flour, half water by weight. A 100g starter adds 50g flour and 50g water to your recipe.
This calculator accounts for the flour and water in your starter when computing actual hydration — so the numbers you see reflect what's actually going into the dough.
How This Calculator Works
Enter your total flour weight, target hydration percentage, salt percentage, and starter details. The calculator outputs exact ingredient weights in grams, baker's percentages for each ingredient, a hydration level indicator, and a complete starter breakdown showing how much flour and water your levain contributes to the total dough.