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Get exact flour and water grams for an 8% tangzhong roux. Total flour splits into the cooked paste and main dough at a 1:5 ratio, sized for milk bread.

📘 How to Use

  1. Enter your recipe's total flour in grams
  2. Set the tangzhong share (%) and the water-to-flour ratio
  3. Read the roux flour, boiling water, total roux weight and flour left for the dough

Tangzhong Calculator

g

All the flour your recipe calls for, such as bread flour.

%

Share of total flour used for the roux, usually 5 to 10%.

x

Water weight per part of roux flour. The standard is 5.

※ Roux weight = roux flour + water. Cool it before adding to the dough.

※ A 1:5 flour-to-water ratio is standard; adjust to 1:4 to 1:6 to taste.

※ Starch gelatinizes around 65°C/149°F, the change that gives the crumb its soft, springy texture.

Flour for the roux
— g
Boiling water for the roux
— g
Total roux weight
— g
Flour left for main dough
— g
info

Tangzhong pre-cooks part of the flour with hot water, then folds it into the main dough. Add the remaining flour and liquid when mixing.

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Tangzhong Calculator | Roux Flour and Water Grams From Your Recipe

Enter your recipe's total flour, the share you want to cook into a tangzhong, and the water-to-flour ratio, and this tool returns the roux flour, the boiling water, the total roux weight, and the flour left for the main dough. It turns the standard "scale a tangzhong into my loaf" math into one screen, sized for soft milk bread and shokupan.

💡 About this tool

The tangzhong (water roux) method gives milk bread its pillowy, slow-staling crumb, but adapting it to a recipe trips people up: you don't add extra flour and water, you borrow them from what the recipe already calls for. That means you need the roux amounts and the remaining main-dough flour at the same time, or the hydration drifts.

The defaults model the classic case: 500g flour, an 8% share, and a 1:5 water ratio give you 40g roux flour, 200g boiling water, a 240g roux, and 460g of flour left for the dough. Change any field and the numbers update on the spot, so you can ask "what if I push the share to 10%?" without redoing arithmetic. It scales from a single home loaf to a big batch by editing one number.

🧐 Frequently asked questions

What share of the flour should go into the tangzhong? A common range is 5 to 10% of the total flour. A bigger share makes a heavier, denser crumb, so 7-8% is a safe starting point for most enriched loaves.

Why is the water ratio set to 5 by default? Tangzhong is conventionally 1 part flour to 5 parts liquid by weight (1:5). The closely related Japanese yudane uses far less water, roughly 1 to 1.5 parts, so lower the ratio if you are making yudane rather than tangzhong.

Do I have to use water, or can I use milk? The math is by weight, so any liquid works. Many milk-bread bakers cook the roux with whole milk, low-fat milk, or a plant milk instead of water; the gram totals here stay the same.

Is the roux ready to use right away? Cook the flour and liquid until it thickens, then cool it (an overnight rest in the fridge is common) before folding it into the dough. The "total roux weight" shown here is simply the roux flour plus the water.

📚 Why 65°C makes the difference

The softness comes from starch gelatinization. When wheat starch is heated with water to around 65°C/149°F, the granules swell and lock in moisture as a gel. Folding that pre-cooked paste into the dough raises its water-holding capacity, so the baked loaf stays tender and resists going stale for days.

Tangzhong and yudane are two takes on the same idea. Tangzhong cooks a loose 1:5 paste on the stove; yudane pours boiling water straight onto flour at a much higher flour-to-water concentration. Both pre-gelatinize the starch, which is why a Western baker can drop either into an existing bread recipe and get a noticeably softer result without changing the rest of the formula.