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DOUGHRISEFOUNDERS
Baking Science
4 min read
How to Hydration: Choosing the Right Water Ratio for Your Sourdough
Confused by hydration percentages in sourdough? Learn how to pick the right water ratio for your flour, skill level, and setup this spring.
person holding black and silver tape dispenserWhy Hydration Is the Dial Most Bakers Forget to Adjust
If you have ever followed a sourdough recipe to the letter and still ended up with a flat, sticky mess, there is a good chance hydration was the culprit. Not your starter, not your shaping, not some mysterious atmospheric event. Just water.
Hydration in sourdough is simply the ratio of water to flour by weight. A dough with 500g of flour and 375g of water is 75% hydration. Sounds simple, and it is, but the effect that number has on everything from how your dough handles to how your crust shatters is enormous.
This one is for bakers who have got a few loaves under their belt and are starting to wonder why that recipe from Instagram turned into a puddle on their worktop.
What Hydration Actually Does to Your Dough
More water means a more extensible, open crumb, and that gorgeous irregular hole structure you see on bakery loaves. It also means a dough that spreads more, sticks to everything, and demands a lot more technique to handle well.
Lower hydration gives you a tighter, easier-to-shape dough with a denser crumb. Less dramatic, but honestly, a well-baked 68% loaf will beat a badly handled 80% loaf every single time. There is no shame in starting lower and working up.
Spring is actually a decent time to start experimenting with hydration because your kitchen temperature is rising and your bulk ferment will move faster. Worth factoring that in when you are planning your bake on a warm April afternoon.
Top Tip
Before you increase hydration, try improving your technique at your current level first. If your 72% dough still feels unmanageable, adding more water will not fix it. Nail your folds, your shaping, and your timing, then nudge the hydration up by 2-3% at a time.
How Your Flour Changes Everything
This is the bit most beginner recipes quietly skip over. Different flours absorb water at completely different rates. A strong bread flour with 13-14% protein will drink up water happily. A lower-protein plain flour or a heritage wheat like Einkorn will be overwhelmed by the same amount.
Wholemeal and rye flours absorb more water than white flour, so if you are adding them to your blend, you will probably want to increase your hydration slightly to compensate. Even the brand of flour matters. Two bags both labelled strong white bread flour can behave quite differently.
A practical rule: if you are baking with an all-white strong flour, 70-75% is a solid working range for most home bakers. If you are blending in 20% wholemeal, try 73-77%. Rye? Even higher, but go carefully.
Reading Your Dough Instead of Chasing a Number
The most useful skill you can build is learning to read what your dough is telling you rather than fixating on hitting a specific percentage. After your autolyse and initial mix, your dough should be shaggy but cohesive. By the end of bulk fermentation it should be smoother, slightly domed, and pulling away cleanly from the sides of the bowl when you tilt it.
If it is spreading immediately when you tip it out, it may be over-fermented or simply too wet for your flour. If it tears when you try to stretch it, it might need more water or more development time. The dough always tells you something useful if you pay attention.
Keeping track of what you changed between bakes is where a lot of home bakers lose momentum. I use Doughrise Pro for exactly this, saving unlimited formulas and pulling up my full bake history so I can actually compare what happened when I bumped hydration from 74% to 77% last month. The export to PDF feature is handy too when I want to scribble notes on a printed sheet during the bake.
Common Mistakes
- Jumping straight to high hydration because a recipe looks impressive. Work up gradually.
- Not accounting for flour type and assuming all bread flour behaves the same way.
- Adding all the water at once rather than holding back 20-30g to add once the dough has come together.
- Blaming hydration when fermentation is the real issue. An over-proofed dough at 70% will still collapse.
- Not keeping notes between bakes, making it nearly impossible to know what to adjust next time.
A Starting Point Worth Trusting
If you are unsure where to begin, 72% with a strong white bread flour is a genuinely good foundation. It is manageable, it teaches you proper folding and shaping technique, and it produces a loaf you will actually be proud of. From there, increase by 2-3% increments and take notes as you go.
Sourdough rewards patience more than any other kind of baking. The good news is that patience is a lot easier to find when the days are getting longer and there is no rush to be anywhere on a Sunday morning.
Head over to doughrise.store for more guides, tools, and everything else you need to keep improving your bake.
Happy baking! Find everything you need at doughrise.store
Photo by Conor Brown on Unsplash