What is Dough Yield?

Here's why dough yield matters: you mix 500g flour, 325g water, 10g salt, and 5g yeast. Your total ingredient weight is 840g. But that's not your dough yield—that's just the sum of your ingredients. Your actual dough yield depends on how much water evaporates during mixing and fermentation. For a lean dough (bread with no fat), you typically lose 2-5% of weight to evaporation. That 840g batch might yield 810g of actual dough ready to divide and shape. Now scale this to your real bakery: you're making sourdough. Your recipe calls for 1,000g bread flour at $0.85/kg ($0.85 per 1,000g), 700g water at $0.01/kg ($0.007), 20g salt at $8/kg ($0.16), and 200g active starter at $0.02/kg ($0.004). Total ingredient weight: 1,920g. After mixing and accounting for 3% evaporation loss during bulk fermentation and shaping, your actual dough yield is 1,862g (1,920g × 0.97). Your total ingredient cost is $1.017. Divide that by 1,862g and your cost per gram is $0.000546. Here's where it gets practical: you divide that 1,862g batch into 6 boules of 310g each. Cost per loaf: $0.169. You sell each loaf for $7.50. Your ingredient cost is 2.25% of your selling price—well within the 25-35% food cost target for artisan bread. But if you didn't calculate dough yield correctly and assumed 1,920g of usable dough, you'd think your cost per loaf was $0.173 and your margin was tighter than it actually is. Enriched doughs (croissants, brioche, cinnamon rolls) have different yield rates because fat and eggs don't evaporate the same way water does. A brioche dough with 500g flour, 100g butter, 150g eggs, 75g sugar, 10g salt, and 150g milk loses less weight proportionally—maybe 1-2% instead of 3-5%. Your yield calculation changes. This is why home bakers selling 12 croissants on Instagram and bakeries producing 200 croissants a day both need to nail this number.