Pizza Dough Calculator

Formula

Ingredients = Total Dough × (Baker's % / Total %)

This Pizza Dough Calculator computes results from your provided inputs using the calculator's underlying model.

Worked Examples

Example 1: Two 12-inch Neapolitan Pies at 65% Hydration

Problem:You want 2 Neapolitan pizzas, 12 inches each, at 65% hydration. How much flour, water, salt and yeast do you weigh out?

Solution:A 12-inch Neapolitan dough ball is 250 g, so total dough = 250 x 2 = 500 g. The Neapolitan percentages sum to 100 (flour) + 65 (water) + 2.5 (salt) + 0.2 (yeast) = 167.7. Flour = 500 x 100 / 167.7 = 298 g. Water = 500 x 65 / 167.7 = 194 g. Salt = 500 x 2.5 / 167.7 = 7.5 g. Yeast = 500 x 0.2 / 167.7 = 0.6 g.

Result:298 g flour, 194 g water, 7.5 g salt, 0.6 g yeast (500 g total dough, 250 g per ball)

Example 2: Four 14-inch New York Pies at 62% Hydration

Problem:Four 14-inch New York style pizzas at 62% hydration. This style adds oil and sugar, so the percentages no longer sum the same way as Neapolitan.

Solution:A 14-inch New York dough ball is 340 g, so total dough = 340 x 4 = 1360 g. New York style adds 3% oil and 1% sugar and uses 0.5% yeast, so the percentages sum to 100 + 62 + 2.5 + 0.5 + 3 + 1 = 169. Flour = 1360 x 100 / 169 = 805 g. Water = 1360 x 62 / 169 = 499 g. Salt = 1360 x 2.5 / 169 = 20.1 g. Yeast = 1360 x 0.5 / 169 = 4 g. Oil = 1360 x 3 / 169 = 24 g. Sugar = 1360 x 1 / 169 = 8 g.

Result:805 g flour, 499 g water, 20.1 g salt, 4 g yeast, 24 g oil, 8 g sugar (1360 g total dough, 340 g per ball)

Frequently Asked Questions

What is hydration in pizza dough?

Percentage of water relative to flour. 60% = 60g water per 100g flour. Higher hydration (65-70%) = lighter, airier crust. Lower (55-60%) = denser, chewier.

How long should dough rise?

Neapolitan: 24-72 hrs cold ferment for complex flavor. Quick rise: 1-2 hrs at room temp. Longer = better flavor development.

Background & Theory

Baker's percentage is the notation that lets this calculator work backwards from a finished dough weight to a shopping list. Every ingredient is expressed as a percentage of flour weight, and flour is always 100 percent. A 65 percent hydration Neapolitan formula therefore reads 100 flour, 65 water, 2.5 salt and 0.2 instant yeast, which sums to 167.7 percent of the flour weight. Dividing your target dough weight by that sum recovers the flour, and every other ingredient follows from it. That is why the calculator asks for pizza count, diameter and style before anything else: those three inputs fix the dough ball weight, and the ball weight fixes the total. Dough ball weight is what most home bakers get wrong. A 12-inch Neapolitan ball is about 250 g, while a 12-inch Detroit pan pizza needs roughly 450 g because the dough has to fill a rectangular steel pan to depth rather than stretch thin over a peel. Style also changes the enrichments: New York dough carries about 3 percent oil and 1 percent sugar for browning and foldability, Detroit carries about 4 percent oil, and true Neapolitan carries neither. Yeast quantity tracks fermentation time rather than style, so the 0.2 percent used for Neapolitan assumes a 24 to 72 hour cold ferment, while 0.5 percent suits a same-day rise at room temperature.

History

Pizza as a tomato-topped flatbread traces to Naples in the late 1700s and 1800s, where it was cheap street food for the city's working poor. The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana was founded in Naples in 1984 to codify what had until then been oral craft knowledge: flour type, dough ball weight, hydration range, fermentation time and a wood-fired oven running several hundred degrees Celsius. In 2010 the European Union granted Pizza Napoletana Traditional Speciality Guaranteed status, putting legal weight behind a recipe that had been passed down by hand for generations. Baker's percentage itself comes from commercial baking rather than from pizza. Industrial bakers needed formulas that scaled from a test batch to a production mixer without recalculating every ingredient, and expressing everything relative to flour made that arithmetic trivial. The notation spread through English-language baking literature during the twentieth century and is now standard in professional training. American regional styles grew up separately: the thin foldable New York slice developed among Neapolitan immigrant bakers in the early 1900s, and the thick Detroit pan style is traced to Buddy's Rendezvous in Detroit in 1946, where dough was baked in rectangular industrial trays. Online dough calculators appeared in the 2000s as home bakers switched from scooping cups to weighing grams.