What hydration actually means.
In sourdough and bread baking, hydration is the weight of water expressed as a percentage of the weight of flour. A dough with 500 g of flour and 350 g of water has a hydration of 70%. The number tells you, at a glance, how wet or dry your dough will feel — and it's the single most useful descriptor of a recipe.
Hydration matters because it shapes everything: the open or tight crumb, the strength you need to develop in the dough, the time and temperature of fermentation, and how the bread bakes. A 65% hydration dough behaves like clay. A 90% one behaves like batter. Knowing exactly where your recipe sits lets you compare bakes, troubleshoot failures, and adjust with intent.
The starter trap most calculators fall into.
Your starter is not just a flavoring agent — it's a mix of flour and water you've already added to the dough. A typical 100% hydration starter is half flour, half water by weight. So when a recipe calls for 100 g of starter, you're effectively adding 50 g of additional flour and 50 g of additional water that need to be counted.
Most online calculators treat starter as a black box. They take the listed water and divide it by the listed flour, ignoring the starter entirely. The number they give you is wrong — sometimes by 5% or more. That's the difference between a workable dough and a sticky disaster.
Bakebench calculates true hydration — the actual water-to-flour ratio in your dough including the contributions from your starter. The result is what your dough will feel like in your hands, not a number on paper.
How to read the breakdown.
The dark panel shows you four things, in order of importance:
True hydration is the headline number. It's the percentage every experienced baker compares recipes by. If you've made a 75% hydration country loaf you loved, you can replicate the feel of that dough by matching this number — regardless of whether the original recipe used a 100% or 50% starter.
Composition shows the proportional weights of each ingredient as a single bar. The visual makes it obvious whether your dough is mostly flour, water-heavy, or salt-light.
Baker's percentages are the universal language for sharing recipes. Once you know your formula in these terms, you can scale it to any size — one loaf or twenty — using the recipe scaler. And to feed your starter properly before mixing the dough, the starter feeding calculator handles the ratios.
Hydration ranges by bread type.
| Bread | Typical hydration | Feel |
|---|---|---|
| Bagels | 50–60% | Stiff, dense, kneadable |
| Sandwich loaf | 60–68% | Soft but shapeable |
| Baguette | 65–72% | Smooth, slightly tacky |
| Country sourdough | 70–78% | Tacky, develops slowly |
| Ciabatta | 80–85% | Slack, almost batter-like |
| High-hydration boule | 82–90% | Pourable, needs careful handling |
These ranges are guides, not laws. The same 75% hydration dough made with bread flour will feel firmer than one made with whole wheat — different flours absorb water at different rates. Adjust by feel, and let the percentage be a starting point.
Common mistakes when calculating hydration.
1. Forgetting the water in the starter
The biggest one. Always factor in starter water. The calculator above does this automatically, but if you're working it out by hand: a 100% starter contributes half its weight as water and half as flour.
2. Using volume instead of weight
A cup of flour can vary by 30 g depending on how it's scooped. Bread baking is a weight discipline. Use a scale — even a $15 kitchen scale is fine.
3. Treating whole wheat like white flour
Whole wheat absorbs more water than white flour. A 75% hydration white-flour dough may feel right; a 75% hydration whole-wheat dough may feel dry. Adjust upward by 3–5% when subbing whole wheat for white.
4. Not adjusting for ambient humidity
In a dry winter kitchen, the same dough feels firmer than in a humid summer one. Experienced bakers adjust water by ~2% based on weather. New bakers can ignore this and learn the feel.