Pizza Calculator
Result
Flour
- Water
- 421 g
- Salt
- 17.0 g
- Dry yeast
- 3.39 g
- Fresh yeast
- 10.2 g
- Dry yeast, by volume
- 1.09 tsp
- Total (baker's %)
- 165.0%
This pizza calculator works backwards from the pizzas you want to the dough you need. Tell it how many balls and how heavy each one is, and it returns flour first, then water, salt and yeast as baker's percentages of that flour. Baker's percentage puts the flour at 100 and everything else against it, which is why a 62% hydration dough totals 165 and why the ratios hold at any batch size. It also reports the yeast as fresh cake yeast and in teaspoons, for kitchens without a scale that reads half a gram.
One kilogram of flour at different hydrations
| Hydration (%) | Water (g) | Salt (g) | Yeast (g) | Total dough (g) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 55 | 550 | 25 | 5 | 1580 |
| 58 | 580 | 25 | 5 | 1610 |
| 60 | 600 | 25 | 5 | 1630 |
| 62 | 620 | 25 | 5 | 1650 |
| 65 | 650 | 25 | 5 | 1680 |
| 70 | 700 | 25 | 5 | 1730 |
| 75 | 750 | 25 | 5 | 1780 |
Salt is fixed at 2.5% and dry yeast at 0.5% of the flour weight, so the only thing changing down the table is water. Read it as: start from a 1 kg bag of flour, and this is what the rest of the dough weighs.
Formula
Flour (g) = total dough ÷ total percent × 100 · Water (g) = Flour × hydration ÷ 100
- dough
- Total dough weight — the number of pizzas times the weight of one ball
- hydration
- Water as a percentage of the flour weight, 50 to 90 for pizza
- salt
- Salt as a percentage of the flour weight
- yeast
- Yeast as a percentage of the flour weight — the one field with no fixed answer
- total percent
- 100 for the flour plus every other percentage, so 165 for a 62% hydration dough
Use it for a dough you are about to make, sized from the pans or from the number of people rather than from the bag of flour: four 280 g balls, eight 250 g balls, one 400 g ball for a big tray. It scales a pizza dough recipe up or down without changing the ratios, and it is the fastest way to see what a change in hydration does to the flour weight.
Worked examples
Four 280 g balls at 62% hydration
- Total dough: 4 × 280 = 1,120 g
- Total percent: 100 (flour) + 62 (water) + 2.5 (salt) + 0.5 (yeast) = 165
- Flour: 1,120 ÷ 165 × 100 = 678.8 g
- Water: 678.788 × 0.62 = 420.8 g. Salt: 678.788 × 0.025 = 17.0 g. Yeast: 678.788 × 0.005 = 3.39 g
- Fresh yeast is three times the dry weight: 3.39 × 3 = 10.2 g, which is 1.09 teaspoons
280 g is the ball weight the Neapolitan rules give for a 28 to 35 cm pizza, so four balls is a normal home batch. Note that water is 62% of the flour but only 37.6% of the dough — the percentages share a denominator, and it is flour.
A single 280 g ball at 65% hydration
- Total dough: 1 × 280 = 280 g
- Total percent: 100 + 65 + 2 + 1 = 168
- Flour: 280 ÷ 168 × 100 = 166.7 g
- Water: 166.667 × 0.65 = 108.3 g. Salt: 3.3 g. Yeast: 1.67 g
- Fresh yeast: 1.67 × 3 = 5.0 g; teaspoons: 1.67 ÷ 3.111 = 0.54
The same 280 g ball now takes 167 g of flour instead of 169.7 g, because raising the hydration and the yeast raised the total percent. That is the whole point of working in percentages: the ball weight is the fixed thing, and the flour gives way.
Limitations
The yeast percentage is the one field this page cannot answer. It depends on how long the dough ferments and how warm it is: 0.5% dry yeast is a same-day dough, while a 24-hour cold ferment needs far less and a warm two-hour proof several times more. The hydration range stops at 90% because wetter doughs are not hand-worked at all. Nothing knows your flour, either — bread flour absorbs more water than all-purpose, so the hydration you settle on belongs to your flour and your oven, not to a recipe.
Frequently asked questions
- How much dough do I need for four pizzas?
- About 1,120 g, which is four 280 g balls — the weight the Neapolitan rules give for a 28 to 35 cm pizza. For 30 cm pizzas in a home oven, 250 g each is common; for a 40 cm tray pizza, 400 g. Enter the count and the ball weight and everything else follows from the two numbers.
- What is baker's percentage?
- A way of writing a dough where the flour is always 100 and every other ingredient is a percentage of the flour, not of the total. Water at 62% means 62 g of water for every 100 g of flour, so the dough totals 165%. It exists so that a recipe scales: multiply the flour and everything else follows in proportion.
- What hydration should pizza dough be?
- 55% to 62% for a crisp, easy-to-handle dough, 62% to 70% for a classic Neapolitan feel, and 75% upward for a wet, open crumb that is hard to shape by hand. The Neapolitan rules give the flour's water absorption as 55% to 62%, which is where the middle of that range comes from.
- Why does the calculator ask for dry yeast when the recipe uses fresh?
- Because dry yeast is what most kitchens have and it is what keeps. The same amount is reported as fresh cake yeast at the bottom of the results — three grams of fresh yeast for every gram of dry — so a recipe written either way can be followed without a second conversion. A 7 g packet is 21 g of fresh yeast.
- Can I use this pizza dough recipe for bread?
- The arithmetic yes, the formula no. Baker's percentage works for any dough, so you can enter a bigger ball weight and get a loaf-sized batch, but a pizza dough at 62% water and 2.5% salt is not a bread recipe: sandwich bread runs wetter and much less salty, and it usually carries oil or butter as well.
References
- Baker's Percentage — the method behind every figure on this page — King Arthur Baking
- Ingredient Weight Chart — grams per cup for flour, water, salt and yeast — King Arthur Baking
- Yeast Conversion Chart: convert fresh cake yeast to dry yeast — Red Star Yeast