Baker's-percentage pizza dough for any number of pizzas, hydration, and yeast type.
Pizza dough is the canonical baker's-percentage problem: every ingredient is expressed as a percentage of flour weight, the total of those percentages tells you the dough mass per gram of flour, and the formula scales linearly to any batch size. Yet home cooks routinely struggle with the arithmetic. They know they want four 240-gram dough balls at 65 % hydration, with the right amount of yeast and salt, but converting that into "exactly how much flour, water, yeast, and salt should I weigh" requires inverting the baker's-percentage formula. This calculator does that inversion. It also handles the small but practical complication of yeast-type substitution: the published recipe might call for instant dry yeast, but you have fresh cake yeast or active-dry — the calculator multiplies the yeast quantity by the appropriate conversion factor (3× for fresh, 1.25× for active-dry).
The output is a complete grocery list ready to weigh: flour, water, yeast, salt, olive oil, and sugar in grams, plus the total dough mass for cross-checking against your scale. A stacked-bar visual makes the proportions intuitive — flour is the dominant block, water is the next, and yeast/salt/oil/sugar are the small accents.
Baker's percentages express each ingredient as a fraction of flour weight: flour itself is 100 %, water is hydration_pct, yeast is yeast_pct, salt is salt_pct, oil is oil_pct, sugar is sugar_pct.
Total dough mass per gram of flour is the sum: 1 + hydration + yeast + salt + oil + sugar (each as a decimal). Call this S.
Given target total dough mass D = pizzas × ball_weight_g:
Yeast-type conversion: the yeast_pct in the recipe is assumed to be in instant dry yeast (IDY). To use: - Fresh / cake yeast: multiply IDY × 3 (cake yeast is ~ 30–35 % of the dry yeast cell density and contains water). - Active-dry yeast (ADY): multiply IDY × 1.25 (slightly less viable than IDY). - Instant dry yeast: ×1 (no conversion).
Hydration of 60 % gives a chewy, easy-to-shape NY-style dough; 65 % is the Neapolitan default; 70 %+ produces high-hydration "blistered crust" pies (Roman-style, Detroit, focaccia-pizza). Above 80 % the dough becomes shapeless without a banneton or bread-pan support.
Enter the number of pizzas and the dough ball weight (typical 200–280 g for personal pizzas, 350+ g for sharing pies). Set hydration as a percentage of flour (60–70 % covers most styles). Enter the yeast as a percentage of flour (0.2–1 % range; lower for long cold-fermented doughs, higher for same-day). Enter salt (1.8–3 %), olive oil (0–3 %, Neapolitan purists go 0 %, NY-style typically 1–3 %), and sugar (0–2 %, helps browning at lower oven temperatures). Pick the yeast type to convert IDY to your form on hand. The result panel shows each ingredient in grams plus a stacked-bar visual.
Four 240-g Neapolitan-style pizzas at 65 % hydration, 0.3 % IDY, 2.8 % salt, 0 % oil, 0 % sugar.
If you only have fresh yeast: 1.71 × 3 = 5.13 g. Active-dry: 1.71 × 1.25 = 2.14 g.
Six 280-g NY-style pizzas at 62 % hydration, 0.5 % IDY, 2.0 % salt, 2.5 % oil, 1.5 % sugar.
Salt percentage is on flour, not on water. Some kitchens (looking at you, ramen culture) express salt as a percentage of water. Pizza-dough convention is flour-based. Crossing the conventions makes salt off by ~50 %.
Bench flour and bowl water are not in the recipe. The grams the calculator gives are into the mixer. You will dust the bench with maybe 20–30 g extra flour during shaping, and that flour gets absorbed into the dough — final hydration is 1–2 percentage points below what was called for. Adjust accordingly if you are chasing a specific texture.
Salt timing matters. Adding salt at the start (in autolyse) tightens gluten development; adding after autolyse is the Italian / French baker convention. The calculator gives quantities, not timing.
Yeast quantity vs fermentation length. 0.5 % IDY is appropriate for a 4–6 hour same-day rise at 22 °C. For a 24-hour cold ferment in the fridge, drop to 0.10–0.15 %. For 48–72 hour cold ferments (the standard for high-quality NY pizzerias), drop to 0.05–0.08 %. Too much yeast in a long ferment over-proofs the dough into something soupy.
Flour absorption variance. "65 % hydration" assumes a standard Italian 00 or US bread flour with ~12–13 % protein. Whole-wheat or high-protein flours absorb more (treat 65 % as 70 % equivalent); soft cake flour absorbs less. Adjust by feel.
Water temperature. The calculator gives weights, not temperatures. For same-day rises, water 28–32 °C accelerates fermentation; for cold ferments, use water at 4–10 °C straight from the fridge.
Olive oil sugar interaction. Adding oil weakens gluten development; adding sugar accelerates browning. Both shift baking temperature down by 10–20 °C compared to a lean dough. The calculator quantifies, but you must adjust your oven.
Salt-yeast contact. Direct contact of dry salt with active yeast in a small dough kills cells. Mix yeast into flour first, then add water, then salt last — or pre-dissolve yeast in part of the water before mixing.
Ball-weight rounding. The calculator gives total dough exactly; once you divide into N balls, scale tolerance is typically ±5 g. That's fine for most styles but matters for competition-grade Neapolitan where balls should be within ±2 g.