In baking, each ingredient is expressed in terms of the flour weight, which is always expressed as 100 percent. For example, let’s take a typical formula for French bread:
* Flour: 100%
* Water: 66%
* Salt: 2%
* Instant yeast: 0.6%
* Total: 170%
So, let’s say we’ve got 500 grams of flour. If I wanted to make French bread, here’s how I’d figure out the weight of the other ingredients
• Water: 500 * 0.66 = 330 grams
• Salt: 500 * .02 = 10 grams
• Instant yeast: 500 *.006 = 3 grams
We can also first decide how much dough we want, and work backwards. Let’s say we want to make 1 kilogram of dough. First, we need to figure out how much flour we need. To do this, we divide the total of all the ingredient percentages added up (170% = 1.7) into the total weight of the dough:
1000 grams / 1.7 = 588 grams of flour (rounded to nearest gram).