Pizza Dough Calculator

Thickness factor is the number that matters

Most dough calculators ask for a ball weight. That’s the wrong end of the problem, because ball weight isn’t something you choose — it’s something that falls out of how big the pizza is and how thick you want it.

Thickness factor is how pizzaioli express that directly: ounces of dough per square inch of finished pizza.

ball weight (oz) = area (in²) × thickness factor

A 14-inch round at TF 0.085 works out to 153.9 in² × 0.085 = 13.1 oz, about 371 g. Now suppose you want 16-inch pizzas instead. The instinct is to keep the ball weight and stretch further — and that’s exactly how you turn a crust you liked into a cracker. Holding TF constant instead gives you 17.1 oz, around 485 g, and the pizza scales the way you actually wanted.

Rough working ranges:

Poolish and biga are counted properly

A preferment is flour and water. If you don’t count them, the dough you mix is wetter than the hydration you asked for — and at the 30–50% prefermented flour ratios common in modern pizza, that gap is large.

Set the preferment percentage and this calculator subtracts its flour and water from what you add later, so the hydration figure describes the dough that reaches the oven. Poolish is conventionally 100% hydration; biga is stiffer, usually 45–55%.

Yeast conversion is built in

Percentages are entered as instant dry yeast, which is how most formulas are written. Pick a different yeast from the dropdown and the gram figure converts for you, at the usual working ratio:

instant : active dry : fresh  ≈  1 : 1.25 : 3

So 5 g of instant is about 6.3 g of active dry, or 15 g of fresh.

The arithmetic

Every percentage is against total flour, preferment flour included:

total dough  = F × (1 + hydration + salt + oil + sugar + yeast)

Working backwards from what you need — which is the normal direction, since you know how many pizzas you’re making — is that equation rearranged:

F = (ball weight × pizzas) ÷ (1 + hydration + salt + oil + sugar + yeast)

Metric or US, including the thickness factor

Switch units and everything switches with it — grams and centimetres, or ounces and inches. The input values are rewritten as you toggle, so the dough you have described stays exactly the same dough; only the language changes.

Thickness factor goes along too, which is the part most tools skip. TF is conventionally quoted in ounces per square inch, and the metric equivalent is grams per square centimetre:

1 oz/in²  =  28.3495 g ÷ (2.54 cm)²  =  4.394 g/cm²

So a New York TF of 0.085 oz/in² is 0.373 g/cm². Same crust, same dough, two vocabularies.

On the style presets

They’re starting points, not doctrine — with one exception. True Neapolitan (AVPN) is not a starting point but a specification: 59% hydration, 3.1% salt, 0.18% fresh yeast, and no oil or sugar, because the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana does not permit them. The high salt and the tiny yeast dose are the same decision made twice — both slow the dough down, and the eight to twenty-four hours that buys is where the flavour comes from.

Emmanuel’s Neapolitan is the same family with the corners knocked off, and loading the two back to back shows exactly which four numbers move:

Less salt and more yeast make it a same-day dough; the oil softens what a fast ferment leaves tight; the smaller ball suits an oven that isn’t a wood-fired dome. Both are written up in full: the standard and my version, the latter with technique videos.

Away from Neapolitan, New York carries oil and sugar because a 550 °F home oven needs the help, and pan styles run wetter and much oilier because the oil is doing the frying.

Change any number and the style switches to Custom — the preset name shouldn’t sit next to a formula it no longer describes.