How Much Flour for Pizza Dough? Work Back From the Ball Weight

2026-10-24

How much flour for pizza dough depends on how much dough you want, and the answer is a single division. Decide how many balls you need and how much each should weigh, add up the baker's percentages of your recipe with flour counted as 100, and divide the dough weight by that sum over 100. Ten balls of 260 g at 60% water, 3% salt and 0.3% yeast make 2600 g of dough and need about 1592 g of flour.

Most pizza guides give you one half of this. Some tell you how heavy a ball should be for a given pizza size. Others hand you a recipe that starts with "1 kg of flour". Very few show the step in between, which is why home batches come out with an odd leftover lump or one ball short. Below is the full path from pizza size to grams of flour, checked against worked examples from a flour mill and from industry references, plus the places where it usually goes wrong.

Start from the dough ball, not the flour bag

Pizza is portioned by weight, so the sensible starting point is the ball, not the flour. The only formal rule comes from the Neapolitan pizza association, AVPN: a 200 g ball for a pizza of 22–24 cm and a 280 g ball for 28–35 cm.

For other styles there's no standard. One rule of thumb from a baking-steel maker is to multiply the diameter in inches by 22 grams, which gives 264 g for a 12-inch pizza. The same guide suggests 18–19 g per inch for a thin, cracker-like crust and 26–28 g per inch for a thick, bready one. The most reliable number is still the weight of a ball from a recipe you already like.

Once you have it, the total is simple: number of balls times ball weight. Ten balls of 260 g is 2600 g of dough. Six balls of 280 g is 1680 g. Everything else is worked out from this figure.

How much flour for pizza dough: the baker's percentage method

Baker's percentages describe a recipe by comparing every ingredient with the weight of the flour. Flour is always 100%. Water at 60% means 60 g of water for every 100 g of flour, whatever the batch size. Salt at 3% means 3 g per 100 g of flour, and so on.

Because each ingredient is a fraction of the flour, the whole dough weighs the flour times the sum of all the percentages divided by 100. Turn that around and you get the flour:

• Add up the percentages: 100 for flour, plus hydration, salt, yeast and oil if you use it.
• Divide the dough weight by that sum divided by 100. The result is the flour in grams.
• Multiply the flour by each ingredient's percentage and divide by 100 to get its grams.

For the ten 260 g balls, an example the Italian mill Caputo uses, the sum is 100 + 60 + 3 + 0.3 = 163.3%. The dough weight of 2600 g divided by 1.633 gives about 1592 g of flour. From there you get 955 g of water, 47.8 g of salt and 4.78 g of dry yeast. Add them up and you're back at 2600 g, which is a handy check.

The same method works with oil. A New York-style formula from pizza consultant Tom Lehmann uses 58% water, 1.75% salt, 3% olive oil and 1.5% compressed yeast, a total of 164.25%. His worked example divides 1,687.5 units of dough by 1.6425 and gets 1,027.39 units of flour. The units don't matter, because the formula is a pure ratio.

Why 60% hydration doesn't mean 60% water

The most common mix-up is reading hydration as a share of the dough. It's a share of the flour. In the batch above, the dough is called 60% hydration, yet the water is 955 g out of 2600 g, well under half the dough. Pizza oven maker Ooni puts it plainly: 1000 g of flour with 600 g of water is 60% hydration.

That's also why the percentages add up to more than 100%. People who see 163.3% for the first time often assume something is off. It isn't. Flour takes up the first 100, and every other ingredient sits on top of it.

Two smaller slips show up in home calculations:

• Leaving salt, yeast or oil out of the sum. Divide by water alone and the flour figure comes out too high, so the balls end up heavier than planned.
• Typing hydration as a decimal. Hydration of 0.6 and 60 are not the same input. Baker's percentages are written as whole percentages, so 60% is entered as 60.

Rounding, leftovers and the dough left in the bowl

If you compare your numbers with a published recipe, you'll often see a few grams of difference. That's usually rounding, not a different formula. Caputo rounds the weight of 1% of flour to 15.9 g, which gives 1590 g of flour instead of 1592 g. The article itself notes the balls will then weigh 259 g and suggests rounding 15.9 up to 16 if your dough comes out short.

King Arthur Baking does something similar on purpose. In its bread example, the multiplier works out to 0.8915, and the article rounds it up to 0.9 because "it is better to have a little extra."

There's a practical reason for that extra. Some dough always stays on the bowl, the bench and your hands. None of these sources gives a fixed allowance for it, so treat it as a judgement call. If you need full-weight balls, add a percent or two to the ball weight or plan for one extra ball.

Weighing precision matters too. A kitchen scale to the gram is fine for flour and water. Salt and yeast are much smaller amounts, and 4.78 g of yeast is where a scale that reads to 0.1 g earns its place.

Yeast is the one number you can't just scale

Scaling a recipe by baker's percentages keeps every proportion exactly the same. For flour, water, salt and oil, that's exactly what you want. For yeast it's only half the story.

The right amount of yeast depends on how long and how warm the dough ferments, not just on the flour. AVPN's own example uses 1.5 g of fresh yeast per litre of water for an 8-hour rise at 23 °C and only 0.3 g for 24 hours. Take your yeast percentage from a recipe that matches your schedule and kitchen, then scale that.

The type of yeast matters as well. AVPN counts 1 g of dry yeast as equal to 3 g of fresh. Whatever percentage you use, it has to be the percentage of the yeast you actually have.

For the other ingredients, some common starting points:

• Hydration: about 60% is easier to handle if you're new to pizza. Neapolitan dough usually sits around 60–65%, and pan styles such as Detroit go up to 70–80%, according to Ooni.
• Salt: 2–3% covers most recipes. Lehmann calls about 2.65% roughly as much as you'd want to use.
• Oil and sugar: AVPN rules for Neapolitan pizza add neither. New York-style recipes often include oil.

One honest limit: if you use a poolish, biga or sourdough starter, the simple method isn't enough. A preferment carries its own flour and water, which must be subtracted from the main mix, and that needs a separate calculation.

Putting it together

The whole routine fits in a few lines:

• Pick a ball weight for your pizza size and style.
• Multiply by the number of pizzas to get the dough weight.
• Add up the baker's percentages and divide the dough weight by that sum over 100 to get the flour.
• Work out water, salt, yeast and oil from the flour.
• Add a little for what stays in the bowl.

The pizza dough calculator below does the arithmetic for you. Enter the number of balls, the ball weight and your percentages for water, salt, yeast and oil, and it returns the flour as the main figure, the grams of every other ingredient, the total dough weight and the sum of the percentages. It's a quick way to check a recipe you found online too: if its grams don't add up to the dough weight it promises, you'll see it straight away.