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Pizza Dough Calculator

Use this free pizza dough calculator to scale any pizza recipe exactly. Tell it how many pizzas you want, how big they are, and how heavy each dough ball should be, then set your hydration, salt, and yeast as baker's percentages. The calculator works out the exact grams of flour, water, salt, and yeast you need — no guessing, no wasted dough, and the same result every time you make it.

How it works

The calculator is built on baker's percentages, the system professional bakers use for every dough. In this system, flour is always 100 percent, and every other ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the flour weight. So 62 percent hydration means the water weighs 62 percent as much as the flour, 2 percent salt means the salt weighs 2 percent as much as the flour, and so on. Because the ratios are fixed, you can scale a recipe from one pizza to fifty pizzas without changing the dough at all — the proportions stay identical.

The first step is finding your total dough weight. The calculator multiplies the number of pizzas by the dough ball weight, so four pizzas at 250 grams per ball need 1,000 grams of dough in total. Then it works backward to find the flour: flour equals total dough divided by one plus hydration plus salt plus yeast (all as decimals). With 62 percent hydration, 2 percent salt, and 0.3 percent yeast, that divisor is 1.643, so 1,000 grams of dough needs about 608.6 grams of flour. Once the flour is known, each other ingredient is simply flour times its percentage — water is 608.6 × 0.62, salt is 608.6 × 0.02, and yeast is 608.6 × 0.003.

Dough ball weight depends on pizza size and crust style. As a starting point, a 10-inch pizza needs about 180 to 220 grams of dough, a 12-inch pizza needs 230 to 280 grams, a 14-inch pizza needs 320 to 400 grams, and a 16-inch pizza needs 400 to 500 grams. Thinner crusts use the low end of each range and thicker crusts use the high end. If you stretch a ball and it tears or will not reach the edge of the pan, the ball was too small; if the crust comes out thick and bready when you wanted thin and crisp, it was too big. Write down the ball weight that works for your pan and style, and use it every time.

Hydration is the single biggest lever on the character of the crust. At 55 to 60 percent hydration, the dough is firm, easy to handle, and forgiving — a good choice for beginners and for thin crusts. At 60 to 65 percent, which covers Neapolitan and New York styles, the dough is softer and the finished crust is lighter with more open air pockets. At 65 to 75 percent, the dough is wet and sticky and needs confident handling, but it bakes into a very light, airy crumb with big holes, which is what pan and Detroit-style pizzas aim for. Higher hydration doughs also ferment faster and need a longer rest before they can be shaped.

Salt and yeast work together to control fermentation. Salt at 2 to 3 percent strengthens the gluten network, slows the yeast down so the flavor has time to develop, and seasons the crust. Yeast is where timing comes in: for a same-day dough that rises for 2 to 4 hours at room temperature, about 0.5 percent instant yeast is right. For a cold ferment of 24 to 72 hours in the fridge — the method most serious home pizza makers prefer — drop the yeast to 0.1 to 0.3 percent, because the yeast keeps working slowly in the cold and too much will over-ferment the dough, leaving it slack, sour, and hard to stretch. If you use fresh yeast instead of instant, multiply the yeast weight by three; active dry yeast can be used gram for gram like instant, though it is best dissolved in the water first.

A practical tip: always weigh your ingredients with a kitchen scale. A cup of flour can weigh anywhere from 120 to 160 grams depending on how it is scooped, which is enough error to turn a 62 percent hydration dough into a 55 percent one. Weighing in grams removes that error completely and is the reason this calculator works in grams by default, with ounces available if you prefer them.

Worked example

You are making four 12-inch New York-style pizzas, with 250-gram dough balls, 62 percent hydration, 2 percent salt, and 0.3 percent instant yeast.

Step 1: Total dough — 4 pizzas × 250 g = 1,000 g.
Step 2: Flour — 1,000 ÷ (1 + 0.62 + 0.02 + 0.003) = 1,000 ÷ 1.643 = 608.6 g.
Step 3: Water — 608.6 × 0.62 = 377.4 g.
Step 4: Salt — 608.6 × 0.02 = 12.2 g.
Step 5: Yeast — 608.6 × 0.003 = 1.8 g.

The recipe is 608.6 g flour, 377.4 g water, 12.2 g salt, and 1.8 g instant yeast, which makes exactly 1,000 g of dough — four 250-gram balls. Mix the flour, water, and yeast, rest 20 minutes, add the salt, knead until smooth, then divide into four balls and cold ferment for 24 to 48 hours for the best flavor.

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