Pizza Dough Hydration Converter: Rescale Any Recipe

Hydration is simply water as a percentage of flour, by weight: hydration = water ÷ flour × 100. A dough with 1,000g flour and 650g water is 65% hydration. Every other ingredient in baker’s percentages works the same way — salt at 2.5% means 25g of salt per 1,000g of flour.

Flour is always 100%, which is why the percentages add up to more than 100. That’s not a mistake; it’s the whole point of the system. It means you can scale a recipe to any size without the ratios drifting.

When you ask this tool to hold the total dough weight steady, it solves for flour rather than just adding water: flour = total ÷ (1 + h + s + y + o), where each letter is that ingredient’s percentage expressed as a decimal. That’s the bit most calculators skip, and it’s the one you need when you want exactly six 280g balls and not “six balls, roughly.”

Flour, semolina, sugar and honey weights follow King Arthur Baking’s published Ingredient Weight Chart, which is the closest thing American baking has to a standard: all-purpose and bread flour at 120g per cup, ‘00’ pizza flour at 116g, whole wheat at 113g, semolina at 163g, granulated sugar at 198g.

One honest discrepancy worth knowing. King Arthur lists a cup of water as 227g, because American recipes treat “1 cup = 8 fluid ounces” and then convert those 8 ounces as if they were ounces of weight. Measured properly, a US customary cup is 236.6ml, so a cup of water weighs about 236g. This tool uses 236g because it’s the physically correct figure — but if you’re following a King Arthur recipe to the letter, use their 227g. On a two-cup recipe that gap is about 18g, which is roughly two percentage points of hydration. Small, but on a Neapolitan dough you’ll feel it.

Salt is the least reliable thing you can measure by volume, because crystal size changes everything: a teaspoon of fine table salt is about 6g, Morton kosher about 5.3g, and Diamond Crystal only about 2.7g. Swap brands without adjusting and you can more than double your salt. Weigh it if you possibly can.

Broadly: lower hydration gives you a stiffer, easier dough and a crisper, denser crust. Higher hydration gives you an open, airy crumb and a dough that fights back.

• 50–55% — thin and crispy, cracker-style, bar pies
• 55–62% — Neapolitan; the AVPN’s own spec sits in here
• 60–65% — New York style, the most forgiving place to start
• 65–75% — naturally leavened and sourdough doughs
• 70–80% — Detroit, Sicilian and other pan pizzas
• 78%+ — Roman al taglio and focaccia, pan only

One caveat that catches people out: flour matters as much as the number. A strong bread flour or a high-protein ‘00’ will absorb noticeably more water than a supermarket all-purpose, so 70% in one flour can feel like 75% in another. Treat the percentage as a starting point and trust your hands.

Starter is part flour and part water, so it changes your real hydration whether you account for it or not. A starter fed at 100% hydration is half flour, half water by weight — so 200g of it adds 100g of flour and 100g of water to your dough.

That’s why the Cups → grams tab reports two numbers when starter is present: dough hydration, counting only the flour and water you added directly, and total hydration, which folds the starter’s flour and water into the sums. The second one is what your dough will actually behave like. If you’ve been wondering why your 65% sourdough handles like a 70% dough, this is usually why.