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Find the water a dough needs from flour weight and hydration (50-100%), minus moisture from eggs or milk, with baguette and ciabatta presets.

📘 How to Use

  1. Enter the flour weight in grams
  2. Set the target hydration with the slider, or pick a baguette or ciabatta preset
  3. Add wet ingredients like egg or milk, then read off the water to pour in

Bread Hydration Calculator

Total Water Needed
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g
Water from Extras
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g
Additional Water
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g
Total Dough Weight
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g

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Bread Dough Hydration Calculator

Enter your flour weight and a target hydration (baker's percentage) to see the total water a dough needs and, crucially, the actual water to pour into the bowl. Add wet ingredients such as egg or milk and the tool subtracts their moisture automatically.

💡 About this tool

Hydration is the weight of water expressed as a percentage of the flour weight. With 500 g of flour at 65% hydration, the dough needs 325 g of water. This calculator runs that math across a 50–100% range and shows four numbers at once:

  • Total water needed — the moisture the whole dough should contain, derived from the hydration percent
  • Water from extras — moisture supplied by egg (about 75% water), milk (about 87%), butter and so on
  • Additional water — the total minus the extras' moisture: the water you actually add separately
  • Total dough weight — flour plus added water plus extras

Presets cover baguette (65%), focaccia (75%) and ciabatta (80%). Drag the slider for any custom hydration in between.

🧐 FAQ

What does hydration mean in bread baking? It is the ratio of water weight to flour weight. 500 g flour with 325 g water is 65% hydration. Higher numbers give a slacker dough and a more open, airy crumb.

How do eggs and milk change the water amount? Eggs and milk are mostly water. The tool treats egg as roughly 75% water and milk as roughly 87%, then reduces the water you pour by that amount. You can edit each percentage by hand per ingredient.

Does butter count toward hydration? Butter is about 15% water, so it contributes a small amount that the tool still includes. The numbers make it clear that fat-heavy add-ins barely move the hydration figure.

📚 Why baker's percentages work

Shifting hydration by just 5% on the same flour weight changes how the dough handles and how the crumb bakes up. A low-hydration dough (around 60%) is firm and easy to shape, while a high-hydration dough (75% and up) develops large holes and a chewier, more open structure. Professional bakeries share recipes in percentages rather than grams because the ratios hold even when batch size changes. Once you have your formula as numbers here, doubling or halving a batch keeps every proportion intact.