Sourdough Hydration Calculator

Hydration is the total water in your dough expressed as a baker's percentage of the total flour — including the water and flour inside your starter. A dough with 550 g total flour and 400 g total water is at 400 ÷ 550 × 100 ≈ 73% hydration. Higher hydration gives a more open, moist crumb; lower hydration gives a tighter crumb and easier-to-handle dough.

Yes — for the true (overall) hydration you must count the starter's contents. A starter kept at 100% hydration is half flour and half water by weight, so adding 100 g of it adds 50 g flour and 50 g water to the dough. Ignoring the starter overstates your hydration on stiff starters and understates the flour in the recipe. This calculator splits the starter for you at whatever hydration you keep it.

Most sourdough loaves are between 65% and 80% hydration. Around 65–70% is the easiest to shape and a good starting point; 75%+ gives a more open crumb but a stickier, harder-to-handle dough. Whole-wheat and rye flours absorb more water, so doughs with them are usually pushed a few points higher.

Most bakers keep their starter at 100% hydration — fed with equal weights of flour and water. Stiff starters (like an Italian lievito madre) are kept around 50–65% hydration, and some bakers use liquid starters above 100%. Enter whatever ratio you feed yours; the math adjusts automatically.

Salt is typically about 2% of the total flour weight (a range of 1.8–2.2% is common) — that's 10–11 g for a dough with 550 g of total flour. The calculator shows your salt percentage against total flour, including the flour in the starter.

Enter your target percentage in the calculator and it returns exactly how much water the recipe needs: required water = target % × total flour − water already in the starter. Add the difference (or hold back water during mixing if you're above target).

A typical loaf uses starter at 10–20% of the flour weight — 100 g starter per 500 g flour (20%) is the most common default, and anything up to about a third is normal (King Arthur's no-knead loaf runs above 30%). The amount is a throttle: more starter ferments the dough faster, less slows it down — bakers often drop from 20% to 10% to stretch bulk fermentation overnight or to cope with a hot kitchen. The prefermented-flour line in the calculator is the precise version of this number.

Usually the hydration is too high for your flour: all-purpose and softer European-style flours absorb less water than 12–14%-protein bread flour, and doughs without much whole wheat or rye feel wetter at the same percentage. Two other culprits: gluten that isn't developed yet (build strength with stretch-and-folds rather than adding flour) and over-fermentation, which breaks the gluten down and leaves the dough slack and gluey. First fix: drop hydration about 5 points — roughly 25 g less water per 500 g flour — and handle the dough with wet hands instead of dusting in extra flour.

Yes. A wetter-than-planned dough usually bakes into a flatter loaf that's still perfectly good to eat. Give it structure by baking it in a loaf pan, or spread it into an oiled pan and bake it as focaccia. An overnight rest in the fridge (cold retard) also firms up wet dough noticeably and makes it easier to score.

In baker's percentages: 100% flour, 70–75% water, about 20% starter and 2% salt. Tartine's famous country bread is literally this ratio — 1,000 g flour, 750 g water, 200 g leaven, 20 g salt. The ratio table above scales it to your batch size.

That's starter : flour : water by weight for feeding a starter — 1:1:1 means equal parts of all three. Bigger ratios give the microbes more food per gram of starter, so the starter takes longer to peak: roughly 4–6 hours at 1:1:1 in a warm kitchen versus 10–12 hours at 1:4:4 — which is why a 1:4:4 feed before bed is ready to bake with the next morning.

Yes — sourdough pizza dough is typically drier than bread dough. King Arthur's sourdough pizza crust works out to about 62% hydration versus roughly 72% for their basic loaf, and pizza doughs in general sit around 55–70%. Enter your starter and flour here to check the hydration, then size and scale the dough balls with our pizza dough calculator.