Sourdough Bread Calculator

How to use

1. 1Pick a style preset (country loaf, whole wheat, sourdough baguette, ciabatta, batard, sandwich pan loaf, high hydration, or beginner) to seed sensible defaults. The note under the preset explains what the style is best for.
2. 2Choose a target mode at the top: By loaf count and weight for a household or production bake, By total flour to scale against a bag of flour, or By total dough to match the capacity of a Dutch oven or pan.
3. 3Adjust the recipe percentages if needed: final hydration (60 to 90% is the practical range), salt (around 2% of flour), levain (10 to 25% of flour), the hydration of your levain itself (100% for a standard liquid starter, 50% for a stiff levain), and an optional inclusion percent for seeds, oats, or nuts.
4. 4Read the Recipe panel for the formula in baker percentages and grams. Read What to actually weigh at the bench for the main-mix flour and water amounts that already subtract the flour and water inside the levain.
5. 5Click Copy recipe to copy a clean text recipe (style, target, formula, and main mix) into your notes, a baking journal, or a shared shopping list.

About this tool

Sourdough Bread Calculator turns a target (loaf count plus finished loaf weight, total flour, or total dough weight) into a precise gram-by-gram naturally leavened bread recipe using baker percentages. The reader picks a style preset (country loaf, whole wheat, sourdough baguette, ciabatta, batard, sandwich pan loaf, a high hydration showpiece, or a forgiving beginner loaf) which seeds the four numbers that shape the bake: final hydration (total water as a percent of total flour), salt percent, levain percent, and the hydration of the levain itself. Every percentage can be overridden by hand so the same tool covers custom formulas, professional bakery scaling, and home experiments. The output reports the formula in two views. The total formula shows total flour as 100%, plus the grams of water, salt, levain, and any inclusions, which is the language bread books and bakery production sheets use. The main-mix view (the section bakers actually weigh at the bench) subtracts the flour and water already inside the levain from those totals so the dough hits the recipe hydration exactly when mixed; this is the step that quietly trips up bakers who multiply percentages without accounting for the levain. Each line in the recipe shows grams and ounces, so home scales in either unit work without a conversion step. A finished-loaf-weight target accounts for typical 12% baking moisture loss, so 900 g target loaves come from roughly 1008 g of pre-bake dough. Inclusions like seeds, oats, nuts, or dried fruit are an optional baker percentage on top of the formula and are surfaced separately so the dough hydration calculation stays clean. A hydration cheatsheet explains how 60 to 90% ranges look in the crumb, how they handle, and which loaves they suit, so the reader can dial the recipe to the equipment and skill at hand. Useful for daily home bakes, weekend bake-along production runs, small-batch farmers market bakeries, hospitality recipe scaling, anyone converting a recipe between one and several loaves, and bread-baking students learning baker percentages from the ground up. The math runs locally in your browser using deterministic IEEE 754 arithmetic; the recipes, weights, and personal scaling numbers you enter are never uploaded.

Free to use. Works in your browser. No signup, no login.