If you’re serious about baking your sourdough bread, you likely came across the term sourdough hydration. There’s talk about low hydration and high hydration sourdough recipes.
If you want to take sourdough baking to the next level, you have to know and, most importantly, understand what sourdough hydration stands for.
The dough hydration basically means the amount of water in the dough, relative to the flour used. It tells us how much water there is in relation to the flour.
The term is actually tightly tied to what’s called “the baker’s percentage“. The baker’s percentage tells us the amount of any given ingredient relative to the amount of flour in a recipe.
Water (in grams) / flour in grams, x 100 = hydration percentage
Because water and flour are the main ingredients in bread (and many baked goods), their ratio plays a major role in what the dough is going to be like and what characteristics the final product will have.
Why is the 100% hydration starter the norm, you may ask? Because a starter at that hydration percentage is easy to pour, easy to mix in with the water and flour, and easy to keep happy and healthy.
– high hydration dough will be sticky and runny. – low hydration dough will be stiff and quite rigid.