Bookreps NZ | Cookbook | The Baker's Percentage

For the sourdough baker ready to stop simply following recipes and start truly understanding bread.

The Baker’s Percentage by Mara Rapini takes a wonderfully different approach to bread making. Rather than giving you page after page of recipes to follow exactly, it teaches you the principles that allow bakers to create bread with confidence — and make it work around real life.

At the heart of the book is the baker’s percentage, a simple formula used by professional bread bakers to adjust ingredients, quantities and fermentation. Once understood, it gives you the freedom to make everything from a beautiful white sourdough to a 100% whole wheat loaf, scale from one loaf to many, and even adjust fermentation to suit your day.

Across 224 pages, Mara guides you through the complete bread-making process, including flour, starters and leaven, mixing and kneading, bulk fermentation, dividing, shaping, proofing and baking.

But here's what makes this book particularly interesting — there are no recipes.

Instead, you're taught how to understand the process, work with the dough and make decisions based on what you're baking, the ingredients you're using and the time you have available.

Along the way, Mara weaves in stories from her own life and her cooking school, Village Dreaming & Farm ORTO, making this much more than a technical bread manual.

Why We Love It

• A completely different approach to bread baking
• Learn how the baker's percentage actually works
• No traditional recipes to simply follow
• Encourages confidence and intuition in the kitchen
• Learn how to scale from one loaf to many
• Adjust fermentation around your own schedule
• Covers sourdough and whole wheat bread
• Detailed guidance on starters and leaven
• Explores mixing, kneading and bulk fermentation
• Covers shaping, proofing and baking
• Combines practical knowledge with personal storytelling
• Brilliant for the home baker ready to understand the why, not just the how
• A fabulous gift for the sourdough enthusiast

Author: Mara Rapini
Pages: 224
Size: 260mm × 205mm
Focus: Bread Making, Sourdough & The Baker’s Percentage

Less following the recipe, more understanding the dough — because once you know how bread works, a whole world of baking opens up.