Pizza Dough Calculator
Choose how many dough balls you want and how much each should weigh, set hydration, salt, yeast and oil as baker's percentages, and get the grams of each ingredient to weigh out. Yeast-type conversion, preferments and sourdough aren't covered.
Your batch
Recipe (baker's percentages, flour = 100%)
Before you mix
- Ball weight follows pizza size. The Neapolitan pizza association (AVPN) uses 200 g balls for a 22–24 cm pizza and 280 g for 28–35 cm. Other styles have no fixed rule, so weigh a ball from a recipe you like and use that.
- Hydration is the water as a percentage of the flour. About 60% is easier to handle if you're new to pizza. Neapolitan dough usually sits around 60–65%, and pan styles like Detroit go up to 70–80%. Wetter dough is stickier but gives a lighter crust.
- Enter yeast as a percentage of the type you actually have. Dry and fresh yeast aren't interchangeable gram for gram: AVPN counts 1 g of dry yeast as 3 g of fresh. Longer, cooler fermentation needs less yeast.
- Some dough always stays in the bowl and on your hands. If you need full-weight balls, add 1–2% to the ball weight or plan for one extra ball.
- Water
- 955 g
- Salt
- 47.8 g
- Yeast
- 4.78 g
- Oil
- 0.0 g
- Total dough
- 2600 g
- Sum of baker's percentages
- 163.3%
How this is calculated
The calculator first works out how much dough you need: number of balls × ball weight. In baker's percentages flour is always 100% and every other ingredient is a percentage of the flour weight, so the whole dough weighs the flour × (100 + hydration + salt + yeast + oil) ÷ 100. Flour is therefore the dough weight divided by that sum ÷ 100, and each other ingredient is the flour × its percentage ÷ 100. This is the standard method in baking references and in flour millers' guides, and their worked examples were used to check the calculator. For example, 10 balls of 260 g at 60% water, 3% salt and 0.3% yeast need about 1590 g of flour.
Common questions
Why are percentages based on flour and not on the whole dough?
That's how baker's percentages work. Flour is fixed at 100%, so "60% hydration" always means 60 g of water for every 100 g of flour, whatever the batch size. That makes recipes easy to compare and scale. It's also why the percentages add up to more than 100%.
Which percentages should I start with?
A common starting point for a Neapolitan-style dough is 60–65% water, 2.5–3% salt and a few tenths of a percent of yeast for a long, slow rise. The AVPN rules work out to about 55–62% water and add no oil or sugar. New York-style recipes often add 1–3% oil. These are starting points, not rules, so adjust after your first bake.
Does this tell me how much yeast to use for my rise time?
No. The right amount depends on fermentation time, room temperature and flour. AVPN's own example uses 1.5 g of fresh yeast per litre of water for 8 hours at 23 °C and only 0.3 g for 24 hours. Take the yeast percentage from a recipe that matches your schedule, and the calculator will scale it to your batch.
Part of Kitchen Calculators