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⚖️ Kitchen maths: scaling, ratios and baker's percentages

A cup of flour is not a unit of mass. Baker's percent is how a loaf survives being scaled.

5
lessons
~20 min
to learn
🔢 Math
subject
Adults
level
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What you’ll learn

  1. The cup that liedSee a measuring cup as volume, not mass, and prefer a kitchen scale after NIST and the density table in SP 430.The same American cup holds about 113 grams of all-purpose flour and 236 grams of water. Packing and the wrong cup add error. NIST's best practice is to weigh.
  2. Need divided by haveCompute a conversion factor as required yield divided by recipe yield, apply it to weights, and name what the factor cannot scale.Need over have. 60 ÷ 25 is 2.4. Multiply every ingredient. Cups magnify error; spices and bake times need a human. Metric weights make the arithmetic kinder.
  3. The recipe under the recipeTreat pie dough, vinaigrette and mirepoix as weight ratios that stay put when the batch changes.A ratio is scale-blind if the parts are masses. 3:2:1 pastry, 3:1 vinaigrette and 2:1:1 mirepoix all keep their colons. Cups break the spell.
  4. Flour is one hundredRead baker's percentage with flour at 100, compute hydration, and find flour from a target dough weight.Every line is a percent of flour, so totals may exceed 100. Water over flour is hydration. 25 kg of a 171% dough wants 14.62 kg of flour.
  5. What the percentage will not fixSeparate what conversion factors, ratios and baker's percent can move from bake time, fermentation and pan geometry.Masses follow the clerk you hired. Heat, spice and clocks do not. Tonight, weigh flour and water and write the hydration. The grandmother's handful is still an open question.

Questions this course answers

NIST's kitchen page treats which method as best practice for recipe accuracy?

NIST says measuring by mass with a kitchen scale improves recipe accuracy compared with fluid or dry measuring cups. Packing and the wrong cup both add error.

About how many grams does NIST SP 430 assign to one cup of wheat all-purpose flour?

NIST SP 430 (2004) lists flour (wheat, all-purpose) at about 113 grams, or 4 ounces, per cup. Water in the same table is 236 grams. Same cup, different mass.

Put the conversion-factor method in the order LibreTexts uses

Conversion factor = required yield ÷ recipe yield. Then every ingredient is multiplied by that number. Increasing a recipe gives a factor greater than 1.

A formula yields 25 portions. You need 60. What is the conversion factor?

60 ÷ 25 = 2.4. LibreTexts uses this exact pair. A factor below 1 would mean you were shrinking the recipe.

Match each kitchen ratio to the parts it keeps, by weight

Ratios keep a colon as you scale. Baker's percent is a special ratio with flour locked at 100.

In baker's percentage, what number is flour always given?

LibreTexts: flour is always 100%. Other lines are percentages of the flour weight, so the column can add to more than 100.

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