Detroit Style Pizza Dough: Pan Weights and Exact Formula

Detroit style pizza is a thick rectangular pan pizza made from a wet dough at 70 to 80 percent hydration, loaded at roughly 0.17 ounces per square inch of pan, topped with cheese pushed to the walls and sauce ladled on after the cheese, and baked at 500F to 550F for 12 to 15 minutes. The defining feature is the frico edge: cheese caramelised directly against hot steel all the way around the rim.

Structurally it has almost nothing in common with round pizza. There is no stretch, no peel, no launch, and no need for a 900F oven. That makes it the most accessible serious pizza style for anyone with a domestic oven, and the wet dough that would be unmanageable on a peel is completely docile in a pan.

How much dough does my pan need?

Pan pizza is sized by area, not by diameter. The working figure is about 4.8 grams of dough per square inch, which is 0.17 ounces per square inch, roughly double a thin round pizza. Multiply the pan's length by its width, then by 4.8.

If you already own a pan of some other size, do the arithmetic rather than guessing. A pan underfilled by 100 g gives you a flat, dense result with no frico edge, because the dough never reaches high enough up the wall to hold the cheese against it.

What is the exact formula?

The reference: 75 percent hydration, 2.2 percent salt, 3 percent olive oil, 0.4 percent instant dry yeast, totalling 180.6 percent. Salt sits slightly below the round-pizza default because a wet dough tastes saltier at the same percentage, and the oil is higher because it is doing structural work in a thick crumb rather than just tenderising a thin one.

Check the second row: 373.8 plus 280.3 plus 8.2 plus 11.2 plus 1.5 equals 675.0 g. Flour comes from dividing 675 by 1.806, the total percentage as a multiplier, and everything else is a percentage of that flour weight. The baker's percentage guide walks through the same calculation if you want to build your own variant.

What hydration should Detroit dough be?

Anywhere from 70 to 80 percent, and the choice is genuinely a matter of texture rather than difficulty, because the pan handles the dough for you.

All three rows are 675 g of dough for a 10 by 14 pan, and all three add back to 675.0 g. The difference between the top and bottom row is about 21 g of water, which does not sound like much and completely changes how the dough behaves in the bowl. Use the hydration calculator to build the version you want.

Which flour works best?

Bread flour at 12.5 to 13.5 percent protein. A high hydration dough needs strong gluten to hold that much water in suspension, and a lower protein all-purpose flour produces a slack, soupy dough that will not build any structure during the folds.

An unbleached bread flour at around 12.7 percent is the straightforward answer and is cheap enough that experimenting costs nothing. Fine-milled Italian 00 flour is the wrong choice here for the same reason it is wrong for New York: it is designed to brown in 90 seconds at 900F, and a 15 minute bake at 525F leaves it pale.

How do I make it, step by step?

1. Mix. Dissolve salt in the water, whisk in a little flour and the yeast, then add the rest of the flour. Hold the oil back until the flour is fully hydrated, then work it in.
2. Do not knead. At 75 percent hydration, kneading is impractical and unnecessary. Use three or four sets of stretch and folds in the bowl, 30 minutes apart, with a wet hand or a bench scraper .
3. Bulk ferment 2 hours at room temperature, or mix in the evening and bulk in the fridge overnight for better flavour. A straight-sided graduated container makes the rise readable rather than a guess, and a proofing container with moulded volume marks does the same for larger batches.
4. Oil the pan generously. Two to three tablespoons, covering the base and all four walls. The dough is effectively shallow fried against the pan and this is not the place to economise.
5. Press out in two stages. Tip the dough into the pan and press it toward the corners. It will resist and spring back. Cover it, wait 20 minutes, and press again. The rest is what lets it reach the corners without tearing.
6. Final proof 2 to 3 hours at room temperature, covered, until the dough has filled the pan and wobbles when you shake it.
7. Top in the Detroit order. Cheese first, right to the edges and pushed up against the walls. Pepperoni or other toppings on the cheese. Sauce goes on after baking, or in two or three stripes on top before it goes in.
8. Bake at 500F to 550F for 12 to 15 minutes on a lower rack, on a preheated stone or steel if you have one.
9. Release immediately. Run a knife around the edge within a minute of coming out, then lift the pizza onto a rack. Left in the pan it steams itself and the base goes soft.

Weigh the dough into the pan on a 0.1 g scale if you are dividing a batch between pans. A 50 g difference between two pans of the same size shows up clearly in the finished height.

What temperature and how long?

Note that no row exceeds 550F. This is a style that a domestic oven bakes properly, and an outdoor oven running at 900F will burn the cheese to carbon long before the centre of a 3 cm thick crumb has set. The bake time and temperature chart covers the equivalents across styles.

Setting the pan on a preheated surface is the single biggest improvement available. Steel or stone stores heat and dumps it into the base of the pan the moment it lands, which is what sets the bottom crust before the interior finishes. A quarter inch steel is the most effective, and a cordierite stone is a good second. The stone roundup compares them by thickness and material.

Cheese, sauce and the frico edge

Brick cheese is traditional and hard to find outside the Midwest. The usual substitute is a 50:50 blend of low-moisture whole milk mozzarella and a mild white cheddar, cubed rather than shredded so it melts in pools rather than a single sheet. Cube size around 1 cm works well.

The frico edge is made, not hoped for. Push cheese firmly into the corner where the dough meets the pan wall, all the way around, and add a little extra there. That cheese renders, fries in its own fat against hot metal and caramelises into the crisp band that defines the style. Skimp on it and you have a good pan pizza rather than a Detroit one.

Sauce goes on last. Crushed D.O.P. San Marzano tomatoes with salt, garlic and oregano, cooked down briefly to thicken since this sauce sits on the surface rather than baking into the dough. Ladle it in two or three stripes down the length of the pizza after it comes out of the oven, or just before it goes in if you prefer it slightly caramelised.

Which pan should I use?

Blued steel and hard anodised aluminium are the two right answers, because both conduct heat quickly into the base and the side walls. Authentic Detroit pans were repurposed industrial parts trays, and their heavy blued steel is a large part of why the style developed the way it did.

Glass and ceramic dishes insulate rather than conduct and give you a pale, soft bottom no matter how long you bake. Thin light-coloured aluminium sheet pans are only marginally better. If you want to try the style before buying a dedicated pan, a cast iron pizza pan browns a base beautifully: it is round rather than rectangular, so you lose the corners, but the crust and the frico edge both work exactly as they should.

What goes wrong most often?

The dough will not reach the corners. You tried to press it out in one go. The gluten needs a rest between attempts: press, cover, wait 20 minutes, press again. Fighting it in a single pass tears the dough and leaves it thin in the middle and bunched at the ends.

The middle sank during baking. Overproofed in the pan. The dough filled the pan, kept going, and had nothing left to hold its structure when the oven heat hit it. Two to three hours is the window, not four.

There is no crisp edge. Either the cheese was not pushed against the wall, or the pan was underfilled so the dough never rose high enough for the cheese to meet metal. Check the dough weight against the pan area first.

The bottom is pale and soft. Not enough oil in the pan, a pan that insulates rather than conducts, or no preheated surface underneath. All three are easy to fix and all three matter.

Cutting and serving

Detroit pizza is cut into squares, not wedges. Release it from the pan onto a rack, wait five minutes so the base stops steaming, then move it to a large serving board and cut with a rocker cutter , which presses straight down through a crisp base rather than dragging the cheese sideways the way a wheel does.

Leftovers reheat far better than round pizza because the crumb holds moisture. Ten minutes at 375F on a rack brings a square back almost completely. If your base ends up softer than you wanted, the base crispness guide covers the usual causes, and if you want deeper flavour without changing anything else, an overnight cold bulk ferment is the easiest upgrade available. Store portioned dough in lidded boxes and read the cold fermentation guide for the yeast adjustment that goes with it.