Why a pizza dough is scaled backwards
Bread formulas usually start from flour. Pizza formulas start from the finished ball, because the ball weight is what the kitchen is committed to: a 12-inch round needs a specific weight of dough every single time, and a pizzaiolo who is 15 g light on the last ball of the night has a problem no amount of good flour fixes.
So the arithmetic runs in reverse. Multiply the number of pizzas by the ball weight to get the dough you need, add a waste allowance, then divide by the total formula percentage to recover the flour. Once you have flour, every other ingredient is a percentage of it — the ordinary baker's percentage convention, where flour is 100% and the percentages therefore sum to more than 100.
The waste allowance is the part home bakers skip and professionals never do. Dough sticks to the bowl, to the hook, to the bench and to your hands, and a small mixer loses proportionally more than a large one. One to three percent covers most setups. On a six-ball batch that is the difference between six balls at 250 g and five at 250 g plus one sad one at 235 g.
Everything below assumes weights in grams. Pizza percentages are small — a yeast figure of 0.2% on 940 g of flour is 1.88 g — and volume measures cannot resolve that. A scale reading to 0.1 g is the single most useful piece of equipment in a pizza kitchen after the oven.
What each percentage does
Hydration sets how the dough stretches and how the crust opens. Neapolitan doughs run near 58-62%: low enough to hand-stretch on a floured bench without tearing, high enough to blister in a 450°C oven. New York style sits a little higher and adds oil. Pan and Detroit styles run to 70% and beyond because the tin carries the dough while it proofs. If you are unsure what your flour will take, work it out with the dough hydration calculator against the miller's absorption figure.
Salt is higher in pizza than in bread — around 2.5-3% of flour rather than 2% — for two reasons. Pizza is eaten with strongly flavoured toppings, and salt tightens gluten, which helps a thin base hold its shape when it is stretched by hand and loaded wet. Salt also slows yeast, which is exactly what you want in a dough intended to ferment for a day or more.
Yeast is the timer, and in pizza it is deliberately tiny. At 0.2% instant dry yeast a dough ferments slowly enough to develop flavour over 24 to 48 hours in a refrigerator; at 1% it is ready the same afternoon and tastes of it. Because the quantity is so small, the difference between 0.1% and 0.3% is a genuine schedule change, not a rounding decision.
Oil and sugar are optional and style-defining. Oil softens the crumb and helps a base stay flexible after it cools; sugar promotes browning in deck and home ovens that cannot reach the temperatures a wood-fired oven does. Neither belongs in a classic Neapolitan dough, which browns from heat alone.
Worked example: six 12-inch pizzas at 250 g a ball
You are making six pizzas from 250 g balls, at 60% hydration with 2.5% salt and 0.2% instant yeast, and carrying a 2% waste allowance.
- Dough for the pizzas. 6 × 250 g = 1,500 g.
- Add the allowance. 1,500 × 1.02 = 1,530 g of dough to mix.
- Add up the percentages. 100 + 60 + 2.5 + 0.2 = 162.7%.
- Solve for flour. 1,530 × 100 ÷ 162.7 = 940.4 g.
- Water. 940.38 × 0.60 = 564.2 g.
- Salt. 940.38 × 0.025 = 23.5 g.
- Yeast. 940.38 × 0.002 = 1.88 g.
- Check. 940.38 + 564.23 + 23.51 + 1.88 = 1,530.00 g. The parts add back to the whole, which is the proof that the division was done correctly.
Now the thickness factor. Each ball is 250 g, which is 250 ÷ 28.3495 = 8.818 oz. A 12-inch round has an area of π × 12² ÷ 4 = 113.10 square inches. The thickness factor is 8.818 ÷ 113.10 = 0.0780 ounces of dough per square inch. Stretch the same ball to 14 inches instead and the area rises to 153.94 in², dropping the thickness factor to 0.0573 — a base roughly 27% thinner from the identical piece of dough.
How to read the thickness factor
The thickness factor is dough weight in ounces divided by the area of the formed pizza in square inches. It is the only way to compare a 250 g ball on a 12-inch round against a 320 g ball on a 16-inch round, because ball weight alone tells you nothing without the diameter it is stretched to.
Area grows with the square of the diameter, and that is the whole reason the number exists. Going from 12 inches to 14 inches is a 17% increase in diameter but a 36% increase in area, so the same dough ball produces a base more than a quarter thinner. Bakers who scale ball weights linearly with diameter end up with thick small pizzas and translucent large ones.
Read your figure against the reference table below rather than against a rule you have read elsewhere, because every row in that table is simply this formula applied to a real ball-and-diameter combination. If your number falls outside the whole table, one of the two inputs is unusual: either the ball is light for the diameter, or you are stretching further than the dough wants to go. To size a ball from a target thickness factor rather than the other way around, use the pizza dough thickness factor calculator.
One thing the thickness factor cannot capture is the rim. A Neapolitan pizza pushes a disproportionate amount of its dough into the cornicione, so two pizzas at the same thickness factor can have very different centres depending on how they were opened.
Thickness factor by dough ball weight and pizza diameter
| Ball weight | 10 in (78.5 in²) | 12 in (113.1 in²) | 14 in (153.9 in²) | 16 in (201.1 in²) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 200 g (7.05 oz) | 0.0898 | 0.0624 | 0.0458 | 0.0351 |
| 250 g (8.82 oz) | 0.1123 | 0.0780 | 0.0573 | 0.0439 |
| 280 g (9.88 oz) | 0.1258 | 0.0873 | 0.0642 | 0.0491 |
| 320 g (11.29 oz) | 0.1437 | 0.0998 | 0.0733 | 0.0561 |
Every figure here is recomputable: convert grams to ounces by dividing by 28.3495, then divide by the area in the column heading. Reading down a column shows how much ball weight changes the base; reading across a row shows how quickly area punishes a wider stretch.
Dough balls lose weight while they proof
A balled dough left uncovered in a proofing box loses water to evaporation and gains a skin. Over a 24-hour cold proof in a loosely covered tray, the loss is small but real, and it falls entirely on the surface — which is where it does the most damage to stretching. Cover balls properly and the arithmetic on this page holds; leave them open and the dough you form is measurably drier than the dough you mixed.
Fermentation itself also consumes a little of the dough's mass as carbon dioxide and ethanol leave. At the yeast levels used for pizza this is well under a percent, and the waste allowance absorbs it.
Mistakes that ruin a pizza dough batch
- Dividing the dough weight by 100 and multiplying by each percentage. Percentages are ratios to flour, not shares of the dough. That error inflates every ingredient by the amount the total exceeds 100%.
- Scaling ball weight linearly with diameter. Area goes with the square of diameter, so a 16-inch pizza needs about 1.78 times the dough of a 12-inch one, not 1.33 times.
- Skipping the waste allowance. The dough left behind always comes out of the last ball.
- Measuring yeast by spoon. At 0.2% of flour the quantity is under 2 g in a domestic batch, which no spoon resolves.
- Adding salt and yeast to the same water at the same time. Salt in direct contact with concentrated yeast slurry slows it noticeably; disperse the yeast first.
- Ignoring dough temperature. A batch mixed at 26°C and one mixed at 21°C are on entirely different schedules even with identical percentages.
- Using bread flour percentages on 00 flour, or the reverse. Absorption and gluten strength differ, so the same hydration gives a different dough.
Fitting the formula to a schedule
The percentages on this page define the dough; they do not define the day. Two further numbers turn a formula into a production plan.
The first is dough temperature. Yeast activity roughly doubles for each 8-10°C rise, so a mix that lands at 26°C instead of 22°C is on a materially shorter clock. Professional kitchens control this with water temperature rather than by guessing, which is exactly what the desired dough temperature calculator works out from your flour, room and mixer.
The second is time and temperature of the proof. A 0.2% yeast dough at refrigerator temperature is a 24-72 hour proposition; the same dough at room temperature is ready in hours. Neither is more correct — but the yeast percentage has to match the schedule you actually intend to run, and it is the number to change when the schedule changes, not the hydration.
If you would rather work from a fixed flour weight than from a ball count — because you have exactly 1 kg of 00 flour and want to know how many pizzas it makes — reverse the calculation with the baker's percentage calculator, which takes flour as the input and reports the dough weight it yields.