Bakers think in percentages
Baker's percentages express a whole loaf as ratios against flour. Set as a table with the hydration figure large, it is a formula anybody who bakes can read at a glance.
Four rows: flour 100%, water 78%, salt 2%, starter 20%. Underneath, much larger,
78 PERCENT HYDRATION.
Anyone who bakes bread reads that as a recipe, a difficulty level and a slightly show-off claim, all at once.
What is a baker's percentage?
A way of writing a formula where flour is always 100.
Every other ingredient is expressed as a proportion of the flour weight, which means the same numbers scale from one loaf to a hundred without any arithmetic. It's how bakeries write recipes and how serious home bakers talk to each other.
It also makes a loaf comparable. Two bakers can exchange four numbers and know exactly what the other one is making.
Why is hydration the headline?
Because it's the number bakers argue about.
Hydration is how much water the dough carries relative to flour, and it decides how the dough handles, how open the crumb is, and how much of a nuisance the whole day will be. Low is easy and tight; high is slack, sticky and produces the holes people photograph.
Printing a specific figure is a small declaration of temperament. 65% and 85% are two different
people.
Does it have to be a real formula?
It should be, and it usually already exists.
Their own loaf, the one they've adjusted forty times, is what makes it a gift rather than a graphic — the numbers are a record of the adjusting. A formula copied off the internet is somebody else's argument.
The starter's name, if it has one, belongs at the bottom in small type. A large proportion of sourdough starters have names, which is a fact about people rather than about bread.
Does it work for things other than bread?
Wherever the craft has its own notation.
A pastry lamination diagram — three folds drawn as a sequence. A tempering curve for chocolate,
which is a graph with two exact temperatures on it. A brew ratio for coffee, 1:16. A cheese
make-sheet with times and pH.
Each of those is the trade writing to itself, which is the thread through this batch — the document beats the symbol.
Can it name a bakery?
Their own, and it's a good use of the format.
A small bakery's house loaf, printed as its formula, is merchandise nobody else can sell and it tells customers something true about the place. Set the name small at the base rather than large at the top — the numbers are the design, and the mark works better as a signature than a headline.
Another bakery's name and marks are theirs.
Is this readable to people outside baking?
Partly, and that's the balance to strike.
FLOUR 100% is odd and inviting to a non-baker — it looks like a joke about flour. The hydration
line reads as a confident number even if the meaning doesn't land. Nobody is excluded, and the
people who bake get a second, much denser layer.
That double reading is the whole reason this format keeps working — precise inside, graphic outside.
Does it print well?
Yes — a short table with one oversized number is a robust layout.
Four rows of large type with a dot leader between label and figure gives strong horizontal structure, and the hydration line supplies the mass a chest print needs. Nothing here is fine enough to be at risk.
Cream, flour-white, sand and pale grey read as a recipe card. Two inks — one for the table, one for the big number — is enough, and the contrast between them is what makes it land from a distance.
How do I get one made?
Describe the formula at JustOG — the percentages, which figure gets to be the headline, and whether the starter has a name. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.
Designs other people have published are in the shop.
Flour is always 100. Everything else is an argument.