Serious Eats ran an interesting post on bakers’ percentages. I’ve posted before about how I tend to think of my bread recipe as a series of ratios. The article explained that bakers tend to describe their mixtures using percentages. However, the twist is that the amount of flour is always regarded as 100% and everything else relates to that (leading to a recipe where the total ingredients is always well over 100%).

That would make my standard recipe 100% flour, 70% water, 0.02% salt and 0.02% yeast. Interesting, although perhaps a better solution would be to use plain old ratios rather than confusing matters with the percentage sign. For my bread, that would be 50:35:1:1.