How the pizza dough calculator works
This calculator uses baker's percentages, the standard system professional bakers use to scale any dough. In baker's math, flour is always 100%, and every other ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the flour weight. Water at 65% means 65 grams of water for every 100 grams of flour; salt at 2.5% means 2.5 grams of salt per 100 grams of flour. This makes a recipe scale cleanly from one pizza to fifty without changing its character.
The formula
You tell the calculator the total dough you need and the percentages you want; it works backward to the flour weight:
- Total dough = number of pizzas × ball weight (grams each)
- Flour = total dough ÷ (1 + hydration% + salt% + yeast% + oil%), where each % is expressed as a decimal
- Water = flour × hydration%, Salt = flour × salt%, Yeast = flour × yeast%, Oil = flour × oil%
Because flour is divided by the sum of every ingredient ratio, the individual weights always add back up to exactly the total dough you asked for. For example, 4 balls of 260 g is 1,040 g of dough. At 65% hydration, 2.5% salt, 0.3% yeast and 0% oil the percentages sum to 67.8%, so flour = 1,040 ÷ 1.678 ≈ 619.8 g, water ≈ 402.9 g, salt ≈ 15.5 g, and yeast ≈ 1.9 g.
Choosing your inputs
- Ball weight: about 250-280 g makes a 10-12 inch Neapolitan pie; 300-370 g suits a larger, thin New York slice pizza; 500-600 g fills a standard sheet pan for a thick Sicilian or Detroit-style bake.
- Hydration: 60-62% is forgiving and easy to shape; 65% is a reliable all-rounder; 70%+ gives an airy, blistered Neapolitan crumb but is sticky and demands a very hot oven.
- Salt: 2-3% of flour is the normal range; below 1.5% the dough tastes flat and ferments too fast, above 3.5% it can slow the yeast noticeably.
- Yeast: 0.2-0.4% instant dry yeast suits a slow 24-48 hour cold ferment; 0.5-1% suits a same-day rise. Fresh yeast is roughly 3x the weight of instant, and active dry is about 1.25x.
- Oil: 0% for classic Neapolitan; 1-3% for a softer New York or pan crust.