Overheard a pastry chef say bakers math is backwards, took me a week to get it

Last Wednesday I was picking up a cake order for my wife's birthday and this pastry chef was talking to a new hire. He said most home bakers do it wrong because they think of percentages as parts of the whole loaf, when really the flour is always 100% and everything else is a percent of that. I laughed it off but then I tried converting my sourdough recipe that calls for 500g flour and 350g water into a formula. Turns out that's 70% hydration and once I started scaling it up for a 2kg batch for a neighborhood bake sale, I only needed one calculation instead of guessing each ingredient. My first attempt came out too wet because I forgot to include the starter's flour and water in the math, so I had to add 40g of extra flour mid-knead. Second try was spot on and now I can resize any recipe in my head in like two minutes. Has anyone else had that "oh duh" moment with baker's percentages, or do you just weigh everything and hope it works?

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noahcampbell1mo ago

Funny how that same backwards thinking shows up everywhere once you notice it. My brother does tile work and his boss measures everything as a ratio to the biggest piece, not the total floor, and it blew my mind the same way. Or when you figure out that a car's gas mileage is just a ratio to the gallon, not the tank size, suddenly you can compare anything. Once you get that one anchor point, everything else snaps into place and you stop doing the extra math. Wish someone had explained percentages that way back in school, would've saved me a lot of guessing with recipes and measurements. What's the thing that clicked for you after you stopped looking at it the normal way?

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