Pizza Dough Calculator — Baker's Percentage by Weight

Real-world use cases

• Scale a 2-ball recipe up to a party of 12

  You have a Neapolitan recipe that makes two 250 g balls and you need twelve for a backyard pizza party. Set ball count to 12, weight to 250 g, pick the Neapolitan preset (62% hydration, 2.8% salt, 0.3% yeast). The tool reports the flour you need for 3000 g of total dough in one shot — no multiplying every line by six and rounding salt wrong. Because it works in baker's percentages, the dough behaves identically whether you make two or twenty.

• Dial in a 72-hour cold-ferment dough

  Long cold fermentation means less yeast and a touch more salt to slow things down. Start from the New York preset, drop yeast from 0.4% to 0.15%, nudge salt to 2.2%, keep hydration at 63%. Read the exact grams — a 0.15% yeast on roughly 1900 g of flour is about 2.9 g, which you'd never eyeball accurately. Note the numbers, mix Tuesday night, bake Friday for a blistered, flavourful crust.

• Convert a pan size into a dough ball weight

  You bought a 28 cm pizza steel and have no idea how much dough a round that size wants. Open the diameter estimator, type 28, set the thickness factor to 0.11 for a medium-thin base. It estimates about 68 g per pizza, which you click straight into the weight field. Now the recipe is sized to your actual equipment instead of a number copied from a stranger's blog with a different pan.

• Build a higher-hydration Roman teglia tray

  Roman pizza al taglio bakes in a rectangular tray at 75-85% hydration for that open, airy crumb. Pick the Roman teglia preset (80% hydration), set one large 500 g ball for the tray, and read off the water — at 80% it's a genuinely wet dough, so seeing the gram split before you start tells you to plan for a stretch-and- fold schedule rather than a knead-and-shape one.

• Hand a tested recipe to a co-host via a share link

  You and a friend are splitting Friday's pizza prep across two kitchens. Get your dough dialled in, click Share link, and paste the URL into chat. The link carries every input — ball count, weight, hydration, salt, yeast — so they open the exact same recipe on their phone instead of you retyping six numbers and one of them getting transcribed wrong.

Common pitfalls

• Forgetting that flour is the 100% base, not the total. Hydration of 65% does NOT mean 65% of the dough is water — it means water is 65% of the flour weight. On a 1000 g dough at 65/2/0.3, flour is about 597 g and water about 388 g, not 650 g. Read the flour figure first; everything else is derived from it.

• Treating yeast percentages as interchangeable across yeast types. The presets assume instant dry yeast. Fresh (cake) yeast is roughly 3× the weight for the same effect, and active dry sits in between and wants proofing. If your recipe calls for fresh yeast, don't paste the dry-yeast percentage straight in.

• Scaling oven time and temperature with the dough. This tool scales ingredient mass only. A bigger batch of dough does not need a hotter or longer bake per pizza — bake temperature is set by your oven and crust style, and each pizza still cooks in its own time. Only the total flour, water and so on change with batch size.

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