Perfect Pizza Calculator

Background.

Most pizza recipes make two pizzas, and most pizza nights need more. Doubling is easy; turning a recipe that yields two balls of about 206 g into five balls of 280 g is where people start dividing on the back of an envelope. Here you pick one of three published King Arthur Baking doughs, say how many pizzas you want and how heavy each ball should be, and get every ingredient in grams, with the hydration the recipe implies and the oven it was written for.

The three styles are specific recipes, not house blends. Neapolitan-style is King Arthur's "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-style is their "New York-Style Pizza": 360 g of bread flour, 206 g of water, 12 g each of salt, sugar and vegetable oil, and a quarter teaspoon of yeast, for two 13-inch pies. Pan is the "Crispy Cheesy Pan Pizza", King Arthur's 2020 Recipe of the Year: 240 g of all-purpose flour, 170 g of water, three-quarters of a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of yeast and 13 g of olive oil, with another 18 g poured into the cast-iron skillet. Only the teaspoon measures needed converting, using King Arthur's own weight chart; every gram figure the recipes print is used as printed.

Keeping the recipes as weights means the ratios bakers argue about fall straight out of them. The Neapolitan dough works out at 73.3% hydration and the pan dough at 70.8%, while the New York dough is a firm 57.2%, drier than its reputation and far easier to stretch by hand than the other two.

A dough recipe is only half the instruction, so each style also carries its recipe's oven: 500 °F on a preheated steel or stone for the two thin styles, 450 °F in cast iron for the pan. Enter your oven's maximum and you are told whether that bake is in reach. An oven that stops at 450 °F makes the pan pizza exactly as written and falls 50 °F short of the thin-crust bakes, which then take longer and colour less.

What is perfect pizza calculator?

A pizza dough calculator turns a plan, how many pizzas and how much dough in each, into a weighed ingredient list. The notation underneath is baker's percentage: flour counts as 100, and every other ingredient is stated as parts per 100 parts of flour by weight. US food law uses the same convention; the federal standard of identity for bread, 21 CFR 136.110, caps optional ingredients in "parts for each 100 parts by weight of flour used". Because flour is the base rather than a share of the whole, a recipe's percentages add up to well over 100: 177.8 for the Neapolitan dough here, 167.4 for New York and 178.8 for pan.

Hydration, water divided by flour, is the percentage bakers quote most because it predicts how a dough behaves. Wetter doughs bake up lighter and more open but sit slack and sticky on the bench; drier ones hold their shape and forgive rough handling. This tool supplies those percentages from its source recipes instead of asking you for them, then adds two things a bare percentage tool cannot: how thick your ball will be once stretched to a given diameter, and whether your oven can bake the recipe as published.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Choose the style first. It fixes the flour ('00', bread or all-purpose), the hydration, the bake temperature and the bake time together, because all four come from one recipe; switching style changes the whole dough, not just a label.
2. 02Enter how many pizzas you want, as a whole number from 1 to 50. If you are feeding a crowd, consider one spare ball, since a torn base is easier to replace than to patch.
3. 03Set the dough per pizza in grams. The results show the ball each recipe implies (about 206 g for Neapolitan, 301 g for New York, 429 g for pan), so start near that figure and go heavier for a sturdier base or lighter for a thinner one.
4. 04Enter the diameter you plan to stretch to. It changes only the dough-per-square-inch figure, never an ingredient, so use it to see how thin a given ball will end up.
5. 05Enter your oven's real maximum. If an oven thermometer disagrees with the dial, trust the thermometer. Read the verdict beside the bake time; if the thin styles are out of reach, the pan recipe at 450 °F is the one written for your oven.
6. 06Weigh everything in grams. Yeast for four Neapolitan pizzas is under a gram, so a scale that reads to 0.1 g earns its place, and the pan oil goes in the skillet, not the mixing bowl.

The formula.

Every ingredient weight comes from one proportion. Add up the source recipe's ingredients to get its total dough weight G. Decide how much dough you want, D = b × n (ball weight times number of pizzas), and scale each ingredient by the same factor: x = g_x × D ÷ G. For the Neapolitan recipe G = 232 + 170 + 8 + 0.375 + 2.0625 = 412.4375 g, so flour is always 232 ÷ 412.4375, about 56.25%, of whatever dough you ask for. Because one factor scales everything, the ingredients add back up to D exactly, and setting the count and ball weight to the recipe's own yield (two balls of 206.2 g for Neapolitan) returns the printed recipe gram for gram.

The fractional grams come from teaspoon conversions in King Arthur's Ingredient Weight Chart: a tablespoon of table salt weighs 18 g, so a teaspoon is 6 g; two teaspoons of instant yeast weigh 6 g, so a teaspoon is 3 g; a cup of granulated sugar weighs 198 g, which makes a teaspoon 4.125 g. That is how an eighth of a teaspoon of yeast becomes 0.375 g and half a teaspoon of sugar 2.0625 g.

Hydration H = 100 × g_w ÷ g_f and total formula T = 100 × G ÷ g_f describe the recipe, not your batch, so neither moves when you change the count or the ball weight. T doubles as a check: flour × T ÷ 100 gives back the total dough.

Thickness uses the trade's dough-per-square-inch figure, t = (b ÷ 28.349523125) ÷ π(d/2)². The 28.349523125 g ounce is exact, because the pound is defined as exactly 0.45359237 kg, and it agrees with the 2.834952 × 10¹ g that NIST SP 811 prints. The figure depends only on ball weight and diameter, so it is the same for all three styles, and it falls with the square of the diameter: stretch one ball from 12 to 16 inches and it covers 78% more area at 44% less thickness.

The oven verdict subtracts your maximum from the recipe's bake temperature. No shortfall means the published window applies; a shortfall of up to 50 °F is flagged as close but slower and paler; anything larger is out of reach. That 50 °F band is a convention chosen for this tool, not a King Arthur figure. Two limits sit outside the arithmetic: the bake window assumes the recipe's surface (steel or stone for the thin styles, cast iron for pan), and the yeast weights are for instant yeast only.

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.