Pizza Dough Calculator

How to use the pizza dough calculator

1. Pick US units or Metric units. The size and weight menus switch to inches and ounces or to centimeters and grams, and the answer is shown in ounces and pounds or in grams and kilograms to match.
2. Enter the number of pizzas. Each pizza gets one dough ball, and the quantities are for all of them together.
3. Choose how to describe the dough ball. Pizza dimensions estimates the ball weight from the style and size of the pizza. Dough ball weight lets you type the weight yourself, which is the better choice when you already have a recipe you like.
4. In dimensions mode, choose the pizza type and enter the diameter (round styles) or the width and length (rectangular styles). Each size has its own inches or centimetres selector.
5. Check the dough settings: hydration, yeast, salt, sugar and oil, all expressed as percentages. The defaults are a sensible starting point for a Neapolitan-style dough.
6. Press the button to see the weight of each ingredient, plus the weight of a single dough ball and of the whole batch.

Whole numbers only: the calculator does not accept a fraction of a pizza, so round up and make a spare ball if you are unsure.

Pizza styles and how much dough each needs

In dimensions mode the calculator multiplies the area of the pizza by a fixed amount of dough per unit of area. Thin, crisp styles need less dough per square inch than thick, pan-baked ones. Round styles use the diameter; rectangular styles use width times length.

The three pan styles share one figure and Tonda Romana shares New York's, so if you like your Detroit pizza thicker or your focaccia airier than the average, switch to Dough ball weight and enter your own number.

For a quick reference, this is what the calculator gives for a single Neapolitan pizza of each common diameter:

Doubling the diameter quadruples the dough, because the area grows with the square of the diameter. A 16 in pizza needs about 78% more dough than a 12 in one, even though its diameter is only 33% larger.

Baker's percentages: how the amounts are worked out

Bakers describe a recipe by comparing every ingredient with the weight of the flour, which counts as 100%. A dough with 60% hydration has 60 g of water for every 100 g of flour, and 2.3% salt means 2.3 g of salt for every 100 g of flour. This makes recipes easy to scale: change the flour and everything follows.

Going the other way, from a target dough weight to the ingredients, divides the total by one plus all the percentages written as decimals:

flour = dough weight ÷ (1 + hydration + salt + yeast + sugar + oil)All percentages as decimals, so 60% is 0.60.

ingredient = flour × its percentage

Example: you want four Neapolitan pizzas of 30 cm (about 12 in). Each ball weighs 265 g, so the batch is 1,060 g. With 60% hydration, 2.3% salt and 0.08% instant yeast, the textbook formula gives 1,060 ÷ 1.6238 ≈ 653 g of flour and 392 g of water. The calculator reports 653 g flour, 392 g water, 15.2 g salt and 0.52 g yeast, which is the same recipe: 392 ÷ 653 is 60% and 15.2 ÷ 653 is about 2.3%.

The calculator rounds the flour up to a whole gram and rounds each ingredient for display, so the printed amounts can add up to a gram or so more than the dough weight. That is far below what a kitchen scale can resolve.

Choosing a hydration level

Hydration is the weight of water as a percentage of the weight of flour. The field accepts 40% to 85%. Higher hydration gives a softer, stickier dough that ferments faster and bakes into an airy crumb, but it is harder to stretch thin. Lower hydration gives a firmer dough that is easier for a beginner to handle.

• 55% to 62%: typical for Italian 00 flour and for thin crusts. 60%, the default, is a good place to begin.
• 58% to 65%: common with strong bread flour, which absorbs more water.
• 65% and above: open-crumb, focaccia and pan pizzas. Expect to use wet hands or a scraper.

For example, 1,000 g of flour at 62% hydration takes 620 g of water. Flours differ, so treat these ranges as starting points and adjust by a percentage point or two at a time.

Yeast: how much, and which type

The right amount of yeast depends on how long and how warm the dough will ferment. The default of 0.08% instant yeast suits roughly twelve hours at normal room temperature. A longer, cooler rise needs less yeast, and a quick two-hour rise needs far more.

The three common types are interchangeable once you convert the amount. As a rule of thumb, one part instant dry yeast equals about 1.5 parts active dry yeast and about 3 parts fresh yeast.

When you change the yeast type, the figure in the Yeast box is rescaled to the new type (instant 1, active dry 1.5, fresh 3) and rounded to three decimals, so the leavening power stays the same. The calculator then uses whatever is in the box, so type a new percentage after changing the type if you want a different dose.

Salt, sugar and oil

• Salt is usually 2% to 3% of the flour. Below that the crust tastes flat, and above it the dough ferments more slowly and tastes salty.
• Sugar is optional. A little (up to about 1%) helps browning in a home oven that cannot reach pizzeria temperatures. Traditional Neapolitan dough has none.
• Oil makes the dough easier to stretch and the crumb softer. Neapolitan dough is classically made without it, while many New York and pan recipes use 2% to 3%.

Sugar, oil, salt and yeast each accept values up to 5%.

Practical tips

• Make one extra ball's worth of dough if you are working with sticky dough, since a few grams always stay on the bowl and the bench.
• Weigh the water and flour instead of using cups. The weight of a cup of flour can vary by a fifth or more depending on how it is scooped; to convert a recipe written in cups, use the cups to grams converter.
• To resize a full recipe rather than a dough, try the recipe scaler. For loaves, the bread calculator works from the same baker's percentages.
• Need to swap one type of yeast for another? The yeast converter does it directly.