Pizza Dough Calculator

A cup of flour can swing 30 grams depending on how you scoop it, and that alone can move your dough from great to gluey. A scale and a little baker’s math fix that for good. This calculator does the math for you: choose a style, a size, and a number of pizzas, and it hands back exact weights you can trust from one pie to fifty.

I built it around real numbers, not vibes. The dough-ball weights come from the same thickness logic pizzerias use, and the style presets track published standards like the AVPN spec for Neapolitan. Adjust anything you like — it’s fully interactive, and every ingredient updates the instant you change a setting.

How to use it

The calculator is built to be fast. Most people get a working recipe in about ten seconds, then tweak from there.

1. Pick a style. Each preset loads sensible ratios — hydration, salt, oil, and a typical dough-ball weight. Start here, then customize anything.
2. Set your size. Round pizzas use diameter; pan styles use length by width. The dough-ball weight auto-fills based on area and thickness.
3. Choose how many pizzas. The total flour, water, salt, and yeast scale in lockstep, so a party batch stays as accurate as a single pie.
4. Dial hydration, leavening, and proof. Slide hydration to match your handling comfort, pick your yeast type, set your kitchen temperature, and choose a fermentation plan. A suggested proofing schedule appears with your recipe.
5. Weigh and mix. Hit “Copy recipe,” grab a scale, and go. If you’re new to weighing, here’s the case for measuring dough without a scale — and why a cheap scale still wins.

What baker’s percentages actually mean

Every serious dough tool speaks in baker’s percentages, and it’s simpler than it sounds. Flour is always 100%. Everything else is measured against the flour weight. So 60% hydration means 60 grams of water for every 100 grams of flour. Salt at 2.8% means 2.8 grams per 100 grams of flour.

Why bakers love this: because everything is a ratio, scaling is trivial. Double the pizzas and every ingredient doubles exactly, and the dough behaves identically. It’s the whole reason a formula that works for two pies also works for twenty.

Hydration is the single biggest lever on texture. Lower hydration (around 58–62%) gives a dough that’s easy to shape with a tender chew. Push it higher (68–75%) and you get a lighter, more open crumb — at the cost of a stickier dough that takes practice to handle. If that trade-off is new to you, our guide to dialing in hydration breaks it down with photos. Flour choice matters here too, since a stronger flour drinks more water; that’s the crux of bread flour versus 00 flour.

Dough-ball weights for any size

Here’s the thing most people get wrong: dough scales with area, not diameter. Bump a pizza from 12 to 14 inches and it sounds like a small change, but the surface area jumps about 36% — so the dough ball has to grow by roughly the same amount, or your crust ends up thin and sad.

The calculator uses a grams-per-square-inch factor for each thickness, then multiplies by the pizza’s area. That’s the same “thickness factor” approach pizzerias use for portioning consistency. For round pizzas the area is π × radius²; for pans it’s simply length × width. The table below shows what that shakes out to for common round sizes.

Approximate dough-ball weights. Neapolitan traditionally lands around 200–280 g per 10–12″ pizza, per the AVPN standard. Treat these as excellent starting points, not gospel — a gram or two either way won’t hurt you.

Once you know your weights, the rest is logistics. Making more than you need tonight? You can freeze the extra dough balls and pull them as needed. And if you’re portioning for guests, it helps to know how many slices you’ll get out of each size before you commit.

Style presets, explained

The presets aren’t just labels — each one loads a different set of ratios, because each style is essentially a different formula.

Neapolitan

Lean and traditional: four ingredients, low hydration (roughly 58–62%), no oil or sugar, and small dough balls stretched thin with a puffy rim. The AVPN specification calls for balls of 200–280 g. Modernist Cuisine’s tested Neapolitan dough lands at about 62.3% hydration — right in that pocket.

New York

A little more forgiving. Slightly higher hydration, plus oil (and often a touch of sugar) for a foldable, chewy slice with some browning. Balls run bigger because the pies run bigger — a 16″ NY pie is a serious amount of dough.

Detroit / Pan

Thick, wet, and baked in a rectangular steel pan. Hydration climbs to around 70% for that open, focaccia-like crumb, and the dough weight is calculated from pan area rather than a circle. Set the pan dimensions and the calculator handles it.

Thin & Crispy

Lower hydration, less dough per inch, and a shorter proof. This is the cracker-crust end of the spectrum — great when you want shatter over chew.

Yeast: how much, and swapping types

Yeast is the one ingredient where less is usually more. The longer and colder your dough ferments, the less yeast it needs — a long, slow rise does the heavy lifting on flavor, so you dial the yeast down, not up. That’s why the calculator drops the yeast percentage as you move from same-day to a 72-hour cold ferment. If you want the full picture on timing, see how long to let it rise and why a slow cold ferment is worth the wait.

Swapping yeast types trips a lot of people up, so the tool converts for you. The reliable ratios, roughly, are:

Instant dry yeast is the most concentrated, so you use the least. Active dry needs a bit more (and a warm-water bloom); fresh yeast is mostly water, so you use about three times as much. Pick your type in the calculator and it adjusts automatically.

Proof temperature and schedule

Two proof options fine-tune the rise. Proof temperature nudges the yeast up or down, because a warm kitchen ferments faster than a cool one — set it to Warm and the calculator trims the yeast; set it to Cool and it adds a little back. Alongside that, the tool prints a suggested proofing schedule for whichever plan you pick, from a few hours on the counter to a multi-day cold ferment with a rest before baking. Treat the times as a map rather than a stopwatch: a gentle poke that springs back slowly means the dough is ready, whatever the clock says.

Going sourdough

Switch the leavening to Sourdough and something important happens under the hood: your starter is itself flour and water, so the calculator subtracts that flour and water from the amounts you add. A 100%-hydration starter is half flour, half water — if it isn’t accounted for, your real hydration drifts and the dough handles differently than you expect.

Set the starter as a percentage of total flour (20% is a solid, reliable default). The tool keeps your target hydration honest and tells you exactly how much flour and water to add on top of the starter. From there it’s a long, patient ferment, and then stretching each ball into a round. Prepping for a group? Our notes on planning a pizza party menu pair nicely with a big batch.

Four things that keep dough consistent

Frequently asked questions