Pizza Dough Calculator

Quick & Easy

Same-day dough, 2–11 hours on the counter. Soft, puffy rim. Best when you decide at lunch to make pizza for dinner. Pizza oven.

New York

Big, thin, foldable slices with a crisp-chewy bottom. High-gluten flour, a little oil and sugar, 1–3 days in the fridge. Best for large pies, pepperoni and cheese slices. Pizza oven at 600–650°F, or a home oven with a steel.

New Haven

"Apizza" from Frank Pepe's and Sally's coal ovens: very thin, charred, chewy and a little oblong. No oil or sugar. Best for tomato pies, white clam pie and simple toppings with a lot of char. Pizza oven around 650°F.

Neapolitan

Thin, soft center and a puffy, leopard-spotted rim, baked 60–90 seconds at 800°F+. Only flour, water, salt and yeast. Best for Margherita and light toppings, eaten right away. Pizza oven only.

Poolish

Contemporary Neapolitan with a wet preferment: a bigger, airier rim, a slightly sweet flavor and the easiest dough to stretch. Best for big "canotto" rims. Start the day before.

Biga

Contemporary pizza with a stiff preferment: a tall, crisp, honeycombed rim, deeper flavor and a strong dough that holds its shape. Best for crisp rims and heavier toppings. Start the day before.

Sicilian

Thick, airy, square pizza baked in an oiled sheet pan with a fried-crisp bottom. Best for feeding a crowd, heavier toppings and leftovers that reheat well. Home oven.

Focaccia

Very wet, olive-oil-rich flatbread dimpled in a pan, with crisp edges and an open crumb. Best as bread, for sandwiches or alongside dinner with rosemary and flaky salt. Home oven.

A preferment is a small batch of flour, water and a pinch of yeast that you mix 8–24 hours before the main dough and let ferment on its own. When it goes into the final dough, it brings the flavor, acidity and gluten development of a long rise, even if the final dough itself only rises for a few hours. It also makes the dough easier to stretch and gives a lighter, more blistered crust. Italian pizzerias use two kinds: poolish and biga.

Poolish

A wet preferment: equal weights of flour and water (100% hydration) with a very small amount of yeast, about 0.05–0.3% of its flour. It looks like thick pancake batter. It ferments 8–16 hours at room temperature and is ready when it is domed, covered in bubbles, smells sweet and yeasty, and is just starting to sink in the middle. Poolish gives an open, airy crumb, a slightly sweet and nutty flavor, and makes the dough very extensible (easy to stretch). Typical use is 20–50% of the recipe's flour. It came to Italy by way of Polish and French bakers, which is where the name comes from.

Biga

A stiff preferment: about 45% water, so it looks like dry, shaggy crumbs rather than a dough. It uses more yeast (around 0.3–1%) and ferments 12–24 hours, ideally somewhere cool (60–65°F). It is ready when it has grown, smells like yogurt or mild wine, and the inside is webbed with gluten. Because it is dry, it ferments slowly and builds strength rather than stretch: biga doughs hold their shape, give a tall, crisp, honeycombed crust, and have a deeper, slightly tangy flavor. Typical use is 30–100% of the flour; a "100% biga" dough puts all the flour in the biga and adds only water and salt on day two. Biga is traditional in Roman and central-Italian baking.

Which to use

How the calculator handles them

The Poolish and Biga recipes are contemporary Neapolitan-style doughs built around each preferment. Any of New York, New Haven, Neapolitan, Sicilian or Focaccia can also use one: pick it under Preferment, and the calculator splits the flour and water between the preferment and the final dough, times the preferment so it is ripe when you mix, and cuts the yeast in the final dough because the preferment already carries a lot of active yeast. Preferment yeast amounts are tiny, so the teaspoon guide helps if your scale doesn't read tenths of a gram.

Oil

Oil coats the gluten, so the dough stretches more easily and the crust stays tender. In a longer bake it also helps the crust brown, and in a pan it fries the bottom crisp.

Very hot pizza oven (750°F+): usually none. The bake is so short the crust doesn't dry out, and the Naples rules don't allow it. Up to 2% is fine if you want a softer, more tender crust.

Cooler pizza oven or home oven (round pizzas): 2–3%. A 4–8 minute bake dries the crust, and oil keeps it tender. New York uses 2%.

Pan pizzas: Sicilian 3–5% in the dough plus oil in the pan. Focaccia 2–5% in the dough, a generous coat in the pan and a drizzle on top before baking.

Sugar

Sugar is for browning. At 1–2% the dough doesn't taste sweet.

Use it when the oven is under about 650°F (home oven, New York at 600–650°F), or for 2–3 day cold ferments, where the yeast uses up the flour's own sugars and the crust can bake pale.

Skip it at 750°F and above: the bottom burns before the top is done.

Yeast starts from the 2-hour recipe (8 g of instant yeast for about 980 g of flour) and scales with time on a curve fitted to the recipes in the research: less time means more yeast. Rise speed roughly doubles for every 15°F of dough temperature, fridge time counts as about 8% of counter speed, and elevation cuts yeast about 15% at 4,500 ft. New York and New Haven get about 40% more yeast because they are mixed with cold water and fermented cold (Eaglespoon uses 0.25% for three days); Neapolitan gets about 40% less, closer to the tiny amounts in the Naples rules. Active dry yeast is 1.25 times the instant amount and fresh yeast 3 times. Yeast is always shown to a tenth of a gram, with a teaspoon guide, so a scale that reads 0.1 g gives you the exact amount. Water temperature is worked out from how warm the dough should be for the plan and your kitchen temperature, then shown as plain warm, room-temperature or cold water, since a few degrees either way matters much less than the time and yeast. Each style sets its own water, salt, oil and sugar from the recipes compared: New York 62% water with 2% oil and 1.5% sugar (Eaglespoon, Dough Guy), New Haven about 63% with no fat (Gozney, Nighthawk), Neapolitan 62% with 2.8% salt and no fat (AVPN rules), Poolish and Biga 68% (Gozney canotto and 100% biga), Sicilian 70% with 4% oil (King Arthur, Pizza Today) and Focaccia 80% (Baking Steel). Water also shifts with the flour: high-gluten and bread flour take a little more, 00 and all-purpose a little less. Pan doughs use 3.9 g per square inch for Sicilian and 5.4 g for focaccia. Each recipe has a shortest time the calculator can work out and a recommended minimum from the published recipes; below the recommended time you get a warning under Time until baking. Ovens: the calculator defaults to the pizza oven for round pizzas and the home oven for Sicilian and focaccia, and the Bake section always shows both. The numbers are estimates, so check the dough itself as you go.