Pizza Dough Calculator

Pizza dough recipes are almost always written in baker's percentages rather than plain grams, and that trips a lot of people up the first time they see it. The rule is simple once it clicks: flour is always 100%, and every other ingredient is expressed as a percentage of that flour's weight, not of the finished dough. A dough at 62% hydration uses 62g of water for every 100g of flour — nothing to do with the total batch size.

That's also why you can't just multiply your target dough weight by the percentages directly. Instead, the calculator takes your total dough weight (number of balls × weight per ball), divides it by one plus the sum of all your percentages, and that gives the flour weight. Every other ingredient falls out from there. For example, four 260g Neapolitan balls (62% hydration, 2.8% salt, 0.3% yeast, no oil) come out to about 630g of flour, 391g of water, 18g of salt, and 2g of yeast — add those up, allowing for a gram or two of rounding, and you're back near 1,040g of total dough.

The style presets aren't arbitrary — they reflect real differences in how each dough is meant to behave. Neapolitan dough is wet and extensible so it can stretch paper-thin at the center while still puffing dramatically at the rim under very high heat. New York dough sits at a similar hydration but adds a touch of oil, which makes the crust more tender and easier to fold. Detroit and Sicilian doughs run wetter still (70% hydration) because they're built to rise inside an oiled pan rather than be hand-stretched, and the extra oil in the pan is what fries the bottom crust golden. Thin & crispy sits at the other end, with hydration low enough to roll or dock without much spring.

If none of the presets match what you're making, pick Custom and set hydration, salt, and oil directly — the underlying math is identical no matter which style is selected.

The three yeast options default to different percentages because they aren't equally concentrated. Instant yeast is dried down to small, highly active granules and can be mixed straight into the flour, so a little goes a long way. Active dry yeast is also dried, but it needs to be dissolved in water first, and some of it dies in that rehydration step — recipes typically compensate with a slightly higher percentage. Fresh (cake) yeast is mostly water by weight, so matching the same rise takes roughly three times as much of it as instant yeast.

These defaults assume a fairly normal room-temperature rise of a few hours. If you're planning a long cold ferment in the fridge — common for Neapolitan and New York styles, where a day or two of slow fermentation builds flavor — it's normal to dial the yeast percentage down and let time do more of the work. Treat the number this tool suggests as a sensible starting point, not a rule.

Salt does more than season the crust — it also tightens the gluten structure and slows fermentation slightly, which is part of why very lean, high-hydration doughs still hold their shape. Oil isn't traditional in Neapolitan dough, but in New York, Detroit, and Sicilian styles it tenderizes the crumb and helps the crust brown. Because oil is its own field here, you can add a small amount to any style, including a Neapolitan-leaning dough, if your oven runs cooler than a proper pizza oven and you want an easier stretch.

Once you've got the gram amounts, mix to a shaggy dough, knead or fold until it's smooth, then divide and shape it into the number of balls you entered above. Let those balls rest, covered, until they've relaxed and roughly doubled before you stretch them — the per-ball flour and water figures above are there so you can check a single portion without doing the division yourself.