Kitchen Calculators on Kitchen Lab Notes

Baker's Percentage Calculator

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why this disagrees with other calculators

Set prefermented flour to 20% and levain hydration to 100%, and this tool will tell you to add less water than most calculators do. It isn’t a rounding difference — the two are answering different questions.

A levain is flour and water. At 100% hydration, 200 g of levain is 100 g of flour and 100 g of water. Those aren’t a separate ingredient sitting outside the formula; they’re part of the dough, and if you don’t count them, the loaf you actually bake is wetter than the number you asked for.

Bulk Fermentation Time Calculator

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Temperature is the variable, not time

“Bulk for four hours” is not a recipe instruction. It’s a recipe instruction for one particular kitchen — and if yours is three degrees cooler, four hours leaves you a third short of where that recipe’s author was.

Fermentation is enzymatic and microbial, and both scale with temperature in a way that’s well described over normal dough temperatures by a Q10 coefficient: the factor by which rate changes per 10 °C.

Pizza Dough Calculator

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Thickness factor is the number that matters

Most dough calculators ask for a ball weight. That’s the wrong end of the problem, because ball weight isn’t something you choose — it’s something that falls out of how big the pizza is and how thick you want it.

Thickness factor is how pizzaioli express that directly: ounces of dough per square inch of finished pizza.

ball weight (oz) = area (in²) × thickness factor

A 14-inch round at TF 0.085 works out to 153.9 in² × 0.085 = 13.1 oz, about 371 g. Now suppose you want 16-inch pizzas instead. The instinct is to keep the ball weight and stretch further — and that’s exactly how you turn a crust you liked into a cracker. Holding TF constant instead gives you 17.1 oz, around 485 g, and the pizza scales the way you actually wanted.