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Bakers’ Percentages
Appears in
By Culinary Institute of America
Published 2015
Bakers’ percentages have two basic functions. First, when a formula is expressed in bakers’ percentages, it is easy to see and evaluate the relationships among the different ingredients. An understanding of the relationships between ingredients will help the baker or pastry chef to recognize a faulty formula, and to prepare basic products without the aid of written formulas, if necessary.
The second function of bakers’ percentages is to make it easy to use a formula in the bakeshop or pastry kitchen. When a formula is expressed in bakers’ percentages, it is easy to scale it up or down. The bread formulas in Chapters 7 and 8 have ingredients listed in U.S., metric, and bakers’ percentages. Because the metric measures have been rounded for ease of use, the bakers’ percentages will not match the metric values exactly; however, bakers’ percentages can be thought of somewhat independently from the ingredient amounts listed. The percentages should be used to scale the recipe and create a formula with measurements that are appropriate for a specific operation.