Cooking with Ratios: Bread, Rice, Coffee and Vinaigrette Without a Recipe

Professional cooks often remember ratios rather than recipes. A ratio tells you how ingredients relate to each other, so you can make any quantity once you know it. It's also why weighing ingredients makes baking more reliable: ratios by weight stay accurate no matter how tightly flour is packed into a cup.

Classic kitchen ratios

Food	Ratio	Measured by
Basic bread	5 flour : 3 water (plus salt and yeast)	Weight
Pie dough	3 flour : 2 fat : 1 water	Weight
Pound cake	1 butter : 1 sugar : 1 eggs : 1 flour	Weight
Vinaigrette	3 oil : 1 vinegar	Volume
Long-grain white rice (stovetop)	about 1 rice : 1.5–2 water	Volume
Drip coffee	about 1 coffee : 15–17 water	Weight

These are starting points; cooks adjust them to taste, altitude and ingredients. Rice in particular varies with the variety and the pot.

Scaling a ratio to the amount you need

Decide how much of one ingredient you want, then work out the "unit" size. For 5 : 3 bread dough with 750 g of flour, one part is 750 ÷ 5 = 150 g, so water is 3 × 150 = 450 g. The same approach works for any ratio, and the scale option in the ratio calculator does it instantly: set the flour term to 750 and the other terms follow.

Scaling to a total batch

Sometimes you know the final amount instead. For 900 g of pie dough at 3 : 2 : 1, there are 6 parts in total, so one part is 150 g: 450 g flour, 300 g fat and 150 g water. This is the "divide a total" mode in the calculator.

Coffee by ratio

For a 1 : 16 ratio and a 500 g (about 17 oz) carafe of water, you need 500 ÷ 16 = 31 g of coffee. Stronger? Try 1 : 15, which takes 33 g. Because water and brewed coffee are close to 1 g per milliliter, weighing water in grams is the same as measuring it in milliliters.

Baker's percentages

Bakers often write ratios as percentages of the flour weight. Flour is always 100%, and everything else is a share of it. The 5 : 3 bread above is 60% hydration: 3 ÷ 5 = 0.6. A typical lean dough might be:

Flour 100%
Water 60–75%
Salt about 2%
Instant yeast about 1%

With 1,000 g flour at 70% hydration, that's 700 g water, 20 g salt and 10 g yeast. Baker's percentages are really ratios with flour fixed at 100, which makes it easy to compare recipes and scale them.

Volume vs. weight

A cup of flour can weigh anywhere from about 120 g to 150 g depending on how it is scooped, so volume ratios for flour are less dependable. Liquids measure consistently either way. When a ratio is given by weight, weigh; when it's given by volume, measure with the same spoon or cup for every ingredient.

Scaling pitfalls

Leavening and salt don't always scale perfectly in very large batches; taste and adjust.
Pan size changes baking time. Doubling a cake recipe in one pan needs a longer, lower bake.
Eggs come in whole units; round sensibly, or beat an egg and weigh out part of it.

Turning a 4-serving recipe into 6 is a proportion problem; see scaling recipes with proportions. For simplifying the numbers you end up with, read how to simplify ratios.