When we want to compare two or more baking recipes, we can use baker’s percentage to guide us in doing so.
Here is how it works…
As a main ingredient in most recipes, flour is always designated as 100%. Each of other ingredients is expressed as a percentage of the total amount of flour.
The following two hypothetical baking recipes will illustrate this point.
|All purpose flour||3 cups||75%|
|Cake flour||1 cup||25%|
|Granulated sugar||1 cup||25%|
|Eggs, 2 large||4 oz or ½ cup||12.50%|
|All purpose flour||2 cups||50%|
|Cake flour||2 cups||50%|
|Brown sugar||½ cup||12.50%|
|Egg, 1 large||2 oz or ¼ cup||6.25%|
|Oil||2 Tbsp or 1oz||3.12%|
- When there is more than 1 type of flour, their total percentage must add up to 100%.
- When baking recipes do not call for flour, the predominant ingredient is designated as 100%.
|1 cup = 8 oz|
|1 whole egg = about 2 oz|
|1 egg white = about 1.25 oz|
|1 egg yolk = about 0.75 oz|
|1 Tbsp = 2 oz|
With the exception of eggs, butter, oil, milk, and water, weight measurement is not the same as volumetric measurement. In other words, 1 cup of flour may have a volume of 8 oz, but does not necessarily weight 8 oz.
Baker’s percentage makes adjusting any baking recipes, either up or down, an easy task. Take hypothetical recipe 1, for example.
Suppose I want to use 3 cups of flours in total instead of 4. I can easily figure out the measurement for other ingredients as follows.
|All purpose flour||75%||2+1/4 cups|
|Cake flour||25%||3/4 cup|
|Granulated sugar||25%||3/4 cup|
|Butter||12.50%||0.375 cup or 3oz|
|approximately 1 whole egg and either a yolk or white|