Perfect Pizza Calculator

Background.

Almost every pizza dough calculator on the internet asks you for a hydration percentage. That is a strange thing to ask a person who is trying to make pizza, because hydration is an output of a recipe, not an input to a decision — nobody stands in their kitchen thinking "tonight feels like 68 percent." This page inverts the question. You choose a style, say how many pizzas you want and how big each dough ball should be, and it hands back every ingredient in grams, together with the hydration that choice implies and the oven specification the recipe was actually written for.

The part that matters most is what sits behind the three styles. They are not archetypes assembled from remembered ratios. Each one is a single named, published King Arthur Baking recipe, stored as that recipe's own printed gram weights, and every percentage on this page is derived from those grams at run time. Neapolitan is "Neapolitan-Style Pizza Crust": 232 g of '00' flour, 170 g of water, 8 g of salt, an eighth of a teaspoon of instant yeast and half a teaspoon of sugar, for two 10-to-12-inch pizzas. New York is "New York-Style Pizza": 360 g of bread flour, 206 g of water, 12 g of salt, 12 g of sugar and 12 g of oil. Pan is "Crispy Cheesy Pan Pizza": 240 g of all-purpose flour, 170 g of water, 4.5 g of salt and 13 g of olive oil, plus another 18 g for the skillet. The consequence is a check you can run yourself: set the pizza count and ball weight to the reference values the results show you, and the calculator returns the printed recipe digit for digit. A test in the suite asserts exactly that for all three styles, so the page cannot quietly drift away from its sources.

Because the recipes are stored as weights rather than percentages, hydration falls out of them instead of being asserted. Neapolitan lands at 73.3 percent, pan at 70.8 percent, and New York at 57.2 percent — much drier than the internet's folklore about New York dough, and a genuinely useful fact, because a 57 percent dough is one that a home baker without a stand mixer can actually shape by hand. That number is not this page's opinion; it is 206 divided by 360, from a recipe you can open in another tab.

The third thing the page reports is the bake specification, and it is there because a dough recipe without an oven is only half an instruction. Each style carries its source recipe's own published temperature, surface and time window: Neapolitan at 500-550 °F on a steel or stone for roughly 8-10 minutes including the broiler finish, New York at 500 °F on a steel preheated for at least an hour for 7-8 minutes, pan at 450 °F in a cast-iron skillet for 18-20 minutes. Enter your oven's maximum and you get a verdict on whether that bake is reachable. Domestic ovens that stop at 450 °F cannot do the two 500 °F styles as written, and the honest answer is to say so and point you at the pan recipe rather than to print a time that will not work.

Four scope limits belong here rather than in an FAQ, because each one changes how the numbers should be read. First, "Neapolitan-style" here means King Arthur's '00'-flour recipe, not the EU Traditional Speciality Guaranteed specification for Pizza Napoletana. That regulation would be the better anchor — it is statutory and it fixes dough-ball weights and a maximum diameter — but its text could not be retrieved from EUR-Lex while this page was built, and reproducing a statutory instrument from memory is worse than not implementing it. Second, the bake window belongs to the recipe's surface. Swap the steel for a bare sheet pan and the window no longer applies; no calculator can model that. Third, the 50 °F "within reach" band in the oven verdict is this page's own convention, chosen so the verdict degrades over a range instead of flipping at a single degree — it is not from any source. Fourth, everything here is mass, never volume, because a cup of '00' flour is 116 g and a cup of all-purpose is 120 g. Two different masses, one measuring cup, and that gap is why serious dough is weighed.

If you already know the percentages you want and simply need them turned into weights, the baker's percentage calculator is the general tool for that and it is the better page for your question. If you are baking pizza with a sourdough starter, the sourdough calculator handles the levain arithmetic this page does not. And if the question is how many pizzas to order rather than how to make them, the pizza party calculator plans the order and the pizza size calculator compares two options on price per square inch.

What is perfect pizza calculator?

A pizza dough calculator turns a plan — this many pizzas, this much dough each — into a weighed ingredient list. It works in baker's percentages, the notation the baking trade and even federal law use: flour is 100 percent and every other ingredient is expressed as a share of the flour weight, which is why the percentages add up to more than 100.

This particular page is a recipe scaler with the recipes already in it. Each style holds one published King Arthur Baking recipe as its own gram weights, so the ratios are read from a source rather than asserted. It scales that recipe to your total dough weight, reports the hydration and total formula percentage that result, computes the dough per square inch of finished pizza, and prints the recipe's own oven temperature and bake window with a verdict on whether your oven reaches it.

It is not a general baker's-percentage tool — it supplies the percentages instead of asking for them. If you want to enter your own hydration and salt figures, that is a different page.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Pick a style. This is the biggest decision on the page: it sets the flour type, the hydration, the oven temperature and the bake time all at once, because all four come from the same source recipe.
2. 02Enter how many pizzas you want. Whole numbers only, up to 50 — there is no such thing as 2.5 pizzas' worth of dough balls.
3. 03Set the dough per pizza. 250 g is a common home-kitchen ball for a 12-inch pizza; the results show you the reference ball weight the source recipe itself implies, so you can see how your choice compares.
4. 04Enter the finished diameter you intend to stretch to. This affects only the dough-per-square-inch figure — no ingredient weight changes — so it is a thickness dial, not a quantity dial.
5. 05Enter your oven's maximum temperature and read the verdict beside the bake window. If it says the style is out of reach, switch to the pan style, which bakes at 450 °F.
6. 06Weigh the ingredients in grams. Every figure is a mass; none of them converts cleanly to cups, and the salt and yeast numbers in particular are small enough that a 0.1 g scale earns its keep.

The formula.

Everything on this page comes from one ratio. The source recipe's ingredient weights sum to its total dough weight G, so an ingredient's share of the dough is g_x divided by G. Multiply that share by the dough you actually want, D = doughBallG × pizzaCount, and you have the weight of that ingredient in your batch. Nothing else is going on.

The worked example makes that concrete. The Neapolitan recipe is 232 + 170 + 8 + 0.375 + 2.0625 = 412.4375 g of dough. Four 250 g balls is 1000 g of dough, so every ingredient is multiplied by 1000/412.4375. Flour becomes 232 × 1000/412.4375 = 562.5 g, water 412.2 g, salt 19.40 g, yeast 0.91 g and sugar 5.00 g.

ROUNDING STAGE: nothing is rounded at an intermediate step. The obvious way to write this calculator is to compute the flour first, round it, then derive the other weights from the rounded flour — and that quietly breaks the one identity a dough calculator must preserve, because the ingredients then no longer sum to the dough weight you asked for. Here every value is carried at full precision in decimal.js and rounded once at the return boundary, so flourG + waterG + saltG + yeastG + sugarG + oilG equals totalDoughG exactly. A test asserts that identity across three styles and five ball weights.

The two percentages are properties of the recipe, not of your batch. Hydration is 100 × water ÷ flour, so the Neapolitan recipe's 170/232 gives 73.3 percent whether you make one pizza or fifty. Total formula percentage is 100 × total dough ÷ flour, which for the same recipe is 412.4375/232 = 177.77 percent; multiplying your flour weight by that figure returns your total dough weight, and a test checks the round trip. The convention that flour is the denominator is not a baking-blog invention — 21 CFR 136.110 writes every optional-ingredient limit for bread as "parts for each 100 parts by weight of flour used", which is baker's percentage written into federal regulation.

Dough per square inch is the only geometry on the page. It converts your ball weight to ounces using the exact avoirdupois ounce of 28.349523125 g — which follows from the pound being defined as exactly 0.45359237 kg, and matches the 2.834952 E+01 that NIST SP 811 prints — and divides by π(d/2)². Because it is pure geometry it is identical across all three styles at the same ball weight and diameter, and it scales as 1/d²: halving the diameter quadruples it. The worked example's 250 g on a 12-inch base is 0.0780 oz/in², while the pan recipe's own 429 g ball on a 9-inch base is 0.2379 oz/in² — three times as much dough per unit of area, which is the numerical difference between pan pizza and Neapolitan pizza stated plainly.

The oven verdict classifies on your raw oven temperature minus the style's published bake temperature, using the unrounded input. Meeting or exceeding it reads "Reaches it". Falling short by up to 50 °F reads "Within 50 °F" and warns of a longer, paler bake. More than 50 °F short reads "Cannot reach it" and names the shortfall. That 50 °F band is a disclosed page convention rather than a sourced figure, and both edges are tested below, at and above for every style.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]King Arthur Baking Company, "Neapolitan-Style Pizza Crust" (current revision, retrieved 2026-07-30; primary; open access). Ingredient list — 2 cups (232 g) '00' Pizza Flour, ⅛ tsp instant yeast, ½ tsp granulated sugar, 1¼ tsp (8 g) table salt, ¾ cup (170 g) water; yield "two 10\" to 12\" pizzas"; "preheat the oven to 500°F to 550°F … with a baking steel or stone inside"; "Bake the pizza for approximately 6 minutes on the steel or 7 minutes on the stone", then broil "2 to 3 minutes".
2. [2]King Arthur Baking Company, "New York-Style Pizza" (current revision, retrieved 2026-07-30; primary; open access). 3 cups (360 g) bread flour, scant 1 tbsp (12 g) sugar, 2 tsp (12 g) table salt, ¼ tsp instant yeast, scant 1 tbsp (12 g) vegetable oil, 206 g water; yield "two 13\" pizzas"; steel or stone on the lower rack, "preheat the oven to 500°F for at least 1 hour"; "bake for 5 minutes", then broil "2 to 3 minutes".
3. [3]King Arthur Baking Company, "Crispy Cheesy Pan Pizza" (2020 Recipe of the Year, current revision, retrieved 2026-07-30; primary; open access). 2 cups (240 g) all-purpose flour, ¾ tsp table salt, ½ tsp instant yeast, ¾ cup (170 g) water, 1 tbsp (13 g) olive oil plus 1½ tbsp (18 g) for the pan; yield "one 9\" to 10\" pan pizza"; "Preheat the oven to 450°F"; "Bake the pizza on the bottom rack of the oven for 18 to 20 minutes".
4. [4]King Arthur Baking Company, Ingredient Weight Chart (current revision, retrieved 2026-07-30; primary; open access). "Salt (table) · 1 tablespoon · 18 g"; "Yeast (instant) · 2 teaspoons · 6 g"; "Sugar (granulated white) · 1 cup · 198 g"; "'00' Pizza Flour · 1 cup · 116 g"; "All-Purpose Flour · 1 cup · 120 g". These are the conversions used for the teaspoon-only quantities in the three recipes above; every quantity the recipes printed in grams is used as printed.
5. [5]U.S. Government Publishing Office / FDA, 21 CFR § 136.110 "Bread, rolls, and buns" (2023 annual edition, retrieved 2026-07-30; primary; open access). Every optional-ingredient limit is expressed as "parts for each 100 parts by weight of flour used" — baker's percentage written into federal regulation, independent of any recipe publisher.
6. [6]National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST SP 811 (2008 edition), Appendix B.9 (retrieved 2026-07-30; primary; open access). "ounce (avoirdupois) (oz) → gram (g) … 2.834 952 E+01" and "pound (avoirdupois) (lb) → kilogram (kg) … 4.535 924 E-01" — the basis for the exact 28.349523125 g ounce used by the dough-per-square-inch figure.