Why scaling by multiplication works.
Bread recipes scale linearly. A 500-gram-flour loaf and a 5,000-gram-flour batch follow the exact same chemistry, the exact same fermentation, and the exact same ratios. The only thing that changes is the absolute amounts — and the time it takes to mix.
Every ingredient gets multiplied by the same scale factor. If your scale factor is 2.0, every weight doubles. If it's 0.5, every weight halves. The baker's percentages — the universal language of bread — stay identical. That's why a recipe written in baker's percentages can be reproduced at any size, anywhere, by any baker. It's a contract: the *ratios* are the recipe.
Original recipe: 500g flour, 335g water, 100g starter, 10g salt. Total: 945g.
You want: a larger 1,500g loaf for a dinner party.
Scale factor: 1,500 ÷ 945 = 1.587.
Scaled recipe: 794g flour, 532g water, 159g starter, 16g salt. Total: 1,500g. Same hydration, same ratios — just bigger.
Two ways to scale: which to use?
Scale by total dough weight is what most home bakers want. You're thinking about loaf size. "I want a 1.2 kilogram loaf for the weekend" is a total-weight target. The scaler figures out the flour, water, starter, and salt to match. Most online calculators only offer this mode.
Scale by flour weight is what experienced and professional bakers prefer. Flour is the foundation — every other ingredient is a percentage of it — so when you change flour, everything else flows. "I want to use exactly 1 kilogram of flour" is the question. This mode is also useful when you have a specific bag of flour to use up, or when you're working from a baker's-percentage-only recipe with no fixed total.
Bakebench offers both. Switch between them anytime, and watch the same ratios produce different absolute weights for different goals. To make sure you have the right amount of starter ready before mixing the dough, the starter feeding calculator handles ratios and peak time predictions.
When scaling doesn't work cleanly.
Pure linear scaling assumes everything in the dough scales the same way. That's true for flour, water, and starter — but a few things behave nonlinearly when you go very large or very small.
Salt and yeast
At extreme scales, salt and yeast can break the linear assumption. A 1% salt fluctuation in a 100g recipe is half a gram of difference — too small to taste. That same 1% in a 10,000g batch is 100 grams — a significant flavor and fermentation effect. Your scale's precision starts to matter at both ends.
Fermentation time
Bigger batches take longer to ferment because the dough mass takes longer to warm and the yeast population takes longer to colonize. A scaled-up recipe might need 30-45 minutes more bulk fermentation. This is feel, not math — pay attention to your dough, not the clock.
Mixing and shaping
A 5kg dough is a different physical object from a 1kg dough. You may need a stand mixer instead of hand mixing, longer stretch-and-folds, and divided shaping. Scaling the recipe is one thing; scaling your kitchen workflow is another.