Pizza Dough Calculator

Why pizza recipes are written as percentages

Every serious pizza formula is expressed in baker’s percentages: flour is always 100%, and everything else is stated relative to it. A dough at 62% hydration, 2.8% salt has 620 g of water and 28 g of salt for every kilo of flour. It reads oddly at first and then becomes the only sensible way to write a recipe, because it separates the *character* of the dough from the *quantity* you happen to be making.

That matters here more than in most baking, because pizza is portioned before it is baked. You do not want “a batch” — you want six balls of 260 g. Working backwards from the finished ball weight to the flour is exactly the sum this calculator does, and it is fiddly by hand because the percentages have to be divided out of the total rather than multiplied into it.

Hydration is what separates the styles

Neapolitan sits around 58–65%. It is a fast, hot bake — 60 to 90 seconds in a wood oven — and a wetter dough would not set before the top burned. New York runs slightly higher and adds oil and a touch of sugar, which softens the crumb and helps it brown in a cooler deck oven; the oil is also what makes a slice foldable rather than crisp.

Roman pan pizza, teglia, goes to 75–80% and sometimes beyond. That much water gives the huge irregular holes and the light, shattering base, at the cost of a dough that cannot be shaped by hand in the usual way — it is stretched into an oiled tray instead. Detroit sits between the two, with enough oil in the pan to effectively fry the bottom.

Cold fermentation needs far less yeast

The yeast quantity here changes sharply with your plan, and that surprises people. A same-day dough at room temperature wants roughly 0.4% instant yeast; a 72-hour cold ferment wants nearer 0.05% — around an eighth. Use the same-day quantity for a three-day dough and it will over-proof in the fridge, going slack, sour and gassy before you bake it.

Time is doing the work in place of yeast, and it is doing it better: a long cold ferment develops flavour through slow enzymatic breakdown that a fast rise never reaches. If you take one thing from this page, make it that — less yeast and more time is almost always the upgrade.

Making it with sourdough

Switch the leavening to a starter and the sums change, because a starter is not just a raising agent — it is flour and water you have already added. A 100% hydration starter is half of each by weight, so 150 g of it brings 75 g of flour and 75 g of water into the dough. Ignore that and a formula you believe is 62% hydration can land several points off, which is the most common reason a sourdough pizza dough handles differently from the recipe it came from. The calculator subtracts both from what you add.

Typical amounts run 10–20% of the total flour. Less starter with a longer, cooler rise gives a milder, more extensible dough — usually what you want for pizza, since aggressive sourness fights tomato and cheese. Expect timings to lengthen considerably: a dough ready in four hours with commercial yeast may want a full day, and the feeding ratio you used beforehand decides how lively it is when you mix.

Baking bread as well as pizza? The hydration calculator and the dough temperature calculator cover the same ground for sourdough.