Baker Percentage - Drawbacks

Drawbacks

Baker's percentages do not accurately reflect the impact of the amount of gluten-forming proteins in the flour on the final product and therefore may need to be adjusted from country to country, or even miller to miller, depending on definitions of terms like "bread flour" and actual protein content. Manipulation of known flour-protein levels can be calculated with a Pearson square.

In home baking, the amounts of ingredients such as salt or yeast expressed by weight may be too small to measure accurately on the scales used by most home cooks. For these ingredients it may be easier to express quantities by volume, based on standard densities. Many breadmaking books targeted to home bakers will provide both percentages and volumes for common batch sizes, for this reason.

Besides the need for appropriate scales, a kitchen calculator is helpful when working directly from baker's percentage.