About the Pizza Dough Calculator
This pizza dough calculator works backwards from the pizzas you want to make. Choose how many dough balls you need and how heavy each should be, then set hydration, salt, yeast, oil and sugar as baker’s percentages. It returns the exact grams of every ingredient so your dough comes out the same size every time.
It suits Neapolitan purists (around 60–65% hydration, 2.5–3% salt, no oil or sugar), New York–style bakers (about 62–65% hydration with 1–3% oil and 1–2% sugar) and pan or Detroit-style pizzas (70%+ hydration). A 250–280 g ball makes a classic 10–12 inch Neapolitan pie; 300–350 g suits a 14 inch New York pizza.
Yeast is entered as a percentage of flour weight for instant dry yeast. As a guide, 0.1–0.2% suits a 24–48 hour cold ferment and about 0.5–1% a same-day dough of a few hours. Weigh ingredients with a digital scale — small yeast and salt amounts are far more accurate in grams than in spoons.
With the default inputs, the flour is 595 g. Change any value above to recalculate instantly.
How to use the pizza dough calculator
- 1Enter how many dough balls you want and the weight of each ball.
- 2Set hydration — 60–65% for Neapolitan, 62–65% for New York, 70%+ for pan pizza.
- 3Adjust salt, yeast, oil and sugar percentages to your style and fermentation time.
- 4Weigh each ingredient in grams from the results.
- 5Mix, ferment, then divide the dough into balls of the target weight.
Formula and method
Baker’s percentages express every ingredient relative to flour, which is always 100%. Adding all the percentages gives the total dough as a multiple of the flour weight — for 65% water, 2.8% salt and 0.2% yeast that is 168% — so flour equals the total dough weight divided by 1.68.
Total dough is the number of balls × the weight of each ball, optionally increased by a small allowance for dough that sticks to the bowl. Each other ingredient is the flour weight multiplied by its percentage. Teaspoon equivalents assume 7 g of dry yeast per 2¼ teaspoons, the size of a standard packet.
- H
- Hydration — water as % of flour
- S
- Salt %
- Y
- Instant yeast %
- O / Su
- Oil % and sugar %
Worked examples
Four 250 g Neapolitan balls at 65% hydration
4 × 250 g = 1,000 g of dough. The percentages add to 168%, so flour is 1,000 ÷ 1.68 = 595 g. Water is 65% of that (387 g), salt 2.8% (16.7 g) and instant yeast 0.2% (1.2 g).
Six 320 g New York–style balls with oil and sugar
Six balls of 320 g is 1,920 g of dough. The percentages sum to 169%, so flour is 1,920 ÷ 1.69 ≈ 1,136 g, water 63% ≈ 716 g, and oil and salt 2% each ≈ 22.7 g.
Two 280 g balls at 70% hydration with 2% loss
560 g of dough plus 2% for bowl loss is 571.2 g. With 173.1% total, flour is 571.2 ÷ 1.731 ≈ 330 g and water 70% ≈ 231 g.
Frequently asked questions
What hydration is best for pizza dough?+
Neapolitan dough is usually 58–65% hydration, New York–style about 60–65%, and pan, Detroit or Roman-style doughs 70–80%. Higher hydration gives a lighter, more open crumb but is stickier and harder to shape.
How much does a pizza dough ball weigh?+
A 10–12 inch Neapolitan pizza uses about 250–280 g of dough. A 12 inch New York pizza uses around 280–300 g and a 14 inch pie about 350 g. Scale the ball weight with the area of the pizza you want.
How much yeast do I need for pizza dough?+
It depends on time and temperature. For a 24–72 hour cold ferment 0.1–0.3% instant yeast is plenty; for a same-day dough of 4–8 hours at room temperature use around 0.5–1%. Fresh yeast is used at about 2.5–3 times the instant weight.
What is a baker’s percentage?+
Baker’s percentages express each ingredient as a percentage of the flour weight, with flour fixed at 100%. They make recipes easy to scale: 65% hydration always means 65 g of water for every 100 g of flour, whatever the batch size.
Should pizza dough have oil and sugar?+
Traditional Neapolitan dough has neither, because it bakes in 60–90 seconds at 450°C+. Home ovens are cooler, so 1–3% oil and 1–2% sugar help New York–style crusts brown and stay tender.