How to Read a Pizza Dough Recipe in Baker's Percentages

Every percentage in a pizza dough formula is a percentage of the flour weight, and flour is always 100 percent. That one sentence is the whole system. Once you have it, any recipe on the internet can be rewritten as a formula, scaled to any number of balls, and checked for errors before you mix anything.

The one piece of arithmetic worth memorising:

flour = total dough weight / (total percentage / 100)

Everything else falls out of that. Water is flour times the hydration percentage, salt is flour times the salt percentage, yeast is flour times the yeast percentage, and the four numbers add back to the dough weight you started with. If they do not, you have made a mistake, which is the real value of working this way.

What does a baker's percentage actually mean?

A baker's percentage expresses every ingredient as a share of the flour weight, not as a share of the finished dough. Flour is the reference and is always written as 100 percent, whatever else is in the formula and however many flours there are.

This is the part that trips people up first. A dough at 65 percent hydration is not 65 percent water. In a 1,000 g dough at 65 percent hydration the water weighs 387.3 g, which is 38.7 percent of the finished dough. The 65 percent figure means the water weighs 65 percent of whatever the flour weighs. It is a ratio to flour, full stop.

The reason bakers use this convention rather than percentages of the total is that it makes formulas comparable and scalable. Two recipes can both be "65 percent hydration" regardless of whether they make two balls or two hundred, and the number tells you something real about how the dough will feel and behave. Percentages of the total dough would change every time you added an ingredient, which would make them useless for comparison.

It also means the total percentage of a formula is always more than 100. Add flour at 100, water at 65, salt at 2.5 and instant dry yeast at 0.3 and you get 167.8 percent. That number is not an error, it is the multiplier you are about to divide by. The baker's percentage explainer covers the concept from first principles, and the baker's percentage chart lists the standard ranges for every pizza style on this site.

How do I turn a total dough weight into a full formula?

Five steps, in this order, every time.

1. Decide the ball weight and the number of balls. Multiply them to get the total dough weight. Four 250 g balls is 1,000 g.
2. Write down every percentage, including flour at 100. For example 100 flour, 65 water, 2.5 salt, 0.3 instant dry yeast.
3. Add them up. 100 plus 65 plus 2.5 plus 0.3 equals 167.8. That is the total percentage.
4. Divide the total percentage by 100 to get the multiplier, then divide the dough weight by it. 167.8 divided by 100 is 1.678. 1,000 divided by 1.678 is 595.9 g of flour.
5. Multiply the flour weight by each remaining percentage. Water is 595.9 times 0.65. Salt is 595.9 times 0.025. Yeast is 595.9 times 0.003.

Worked all the way through, with three decimal places carried before rounding:

• Flour: 1,000 / 1.678 = 595.947 g, rounds to 595.9 g
• Water: 595.947 x 0.65 = 387.366 g, rounds to 387.3 g
• Salt: 595.947 x 0.025 = 14.899 g, rounds to 14.9 g
• Instant dry yeast: 595.947 x 0.003 = 1.788 g, rounds to 1.8 g

Add the unrounded figures: 595.947 plus 387.366 plus 14.899 plus 1.788 equals exactly 1,000.000 g, which divides into four 250 g balls. That check is the point of the whole exercise and it is covered in more detail further down.

How do I convert a recipe written in cups?

Convert to grams first, then work out the percentages, then decide whether the recipe is any good. Doing it in that order usually answers the question of why the dough was not working.

Look at the three salt rows. The same "1 teaspoon of salt" is 6.0 g, 4.8 g or 2.8 g depending entirely on which box is in your cupboard, and none of the three recipes will tell you which one the author meant. On 500 g of flour that is the difference between 1.2 percent salt and 2.4 percent salt, which is the difference between a dough that tastes flat and one that tastes correct, and it also changes how fast the dough ferments.

A worked conversion. Take a typical recipe: 4 cups flour, 1 and 1/2 cups warm water, 2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon instant yeast, makes 4 pizzas.

• Flour: 4 x 125 = 500 g
• Water: 1.5 x 237 = 355.5 g, so hydration is 355.5 / 500 = 71.1 percent
• Salt, assuming fine sea salt: 2 x 6.0 = 12 g, so 12 / 500 = 2.4 percent
• Instant yeast: 1 x 3.1 = 3.1 g, so 3.1 / 500 = 0.62 percent
• Total dough: 500 plus 355.5 plus 12 plus 3.1 = 870.6 g, so each of the four balls is 217.7 g

Now the recipe tells you something it never said out loud. It is a 71.1 percent hydration dough, which is well past Neapolitan territory at 58 to 65 percent and past New York at 60 to 65. It carries 0.62 percent yeast, which is above the 0.3 to 0.5 percent same-day range, so it is built to be mixed and baked within a few hours. And the balls come out at 217.7 g, which is under the 230 to 280 g a 12 inch Neapolitan pizza wants. That is not a Neapolitan recipe at all, and if you had been trying to make Neapolitan pizza with it, you now know why it was not working.

How do I read a formula table?

A formula table has one percentage column and one weight column per batch size. The percentage column is the recipe. The weight columns are just that recipe applied to different totals, so they change and the percentages never do.

Below is the same 65 percent hydration formula at three batch sizes: two 250 g balls, four 250 g balls, and six 280 g balls. The total percentage is 167.8 in every column, so the divisor is 1.678 in every column.

Every column was produced the same way. For the six ball column: 6 times 280 is 1,680 g of dough, 1,680 divided by 1.678 is 1,001.2 g of flour, times 0.65 is 650.8 g of water, times 0.025 is 25.0 g of salt, times 0.003 is 3.0 g of yeast. Add those four back: 1,001.2 plus 650.8 plus 25.0 plus 3.0 equals 1,680.0 g. The formula closes.

Note the yeast row across the three columns: 0.9 g, 1.8 g, 3.0 g. There is no measuring spoon in any kitchen that distinguishes 0.9 g from 1.8 g of a fine granule, and the difference between those two is a dough that proofs in four hours and one that proofs in two. This is why a 0.1 g resolution digital scale is the first item on every equipment list on this site. A scale that reads in whole grams cannot execute the bottom row of this table at all.

How do I scale a formula to any number of balls?

Rerun the formula from the top with a new total dough weight. Do not scale the individual ingredient weights, and in particular do not multiply a four ball recipe by 1.5 to get six balls. Scaling rounded weights compounds the rounding, and by the time you have done it twice the salt percentage has drifted.

The correct sequence is always the same three lines:

1. New total dough weight = ball weight x number of balls.
2. New flour weight = new total / the same multiplier as before.
3. Everything else = new flour weight x its own percentage.

Worked once more, converting the cups recipe from earlier into four proper 250 g Neapolitan balls at 62 percent hydration, 2.5 percent salt and 0.3 percent instant dry yeast. Total percentage is 100 plus 62 plus 2.5 plus 0.3, which is 164.8, so the multiplier is 1.648.

• Total dough: 4 x 250 = 1,000 g
• Flour: 1,000 / 1.648 = 606.8 g
• Water: 606.8 x 0.62 = 376.2 g
• Salt: 606.8 x 0.025 = 15.2 g
• Instant dry yeast: 606.8 x 0.003 = 1.8 g
• Check: 606.8 plus 376.2 plus 15.2 plus 1.8 = 1,000.0 g

Compare that to the 65 percent version in the table above. Dropping hydration by three points raised the flour from 595.9 g to 606.8 g and dropped the water from 387.3 g to 376.2 g. Eleven grams of water, which you can barely see in a bowl and can absolutely feel in your hands. The dough hydration calculator does all of this in one pass if you would rather not run the arithmetic by hand.

How do I set the ball weight in the first place?

Ball weight comes from pizza area, not pizza diameter, because area is what the dough has to cover. The rule this site uses is grams of dough per square inch of finished pizza: 2.0 to 2.3 for Neapolitan, 2.4 to 2.9 for New York, and 3.2 to 3.8 for Detroit and pan styles.

Area of a circle is pi times the radius squared. A 12 inch pizza has a 6 inch radius, so its area is 3.1416 times 36, which is 113.1 square inches. At 2.2 g per square inch that is 113.1 times 2.2, which is 249 g. That lands squarely inside the 230 to 280 g Neapolitan range, which is the check that the rule is working.

Every ball weight in that table sits inside the reference ranges used across this site: 230 to 280 g for a 12 inch Neapolitan, 370 to 450 g for a 14 inch New York, and 480 to 580 g for a 16 inch. The dough ball weight calculator runs the same arithmetic for any diameter, and the ball size by diameter chart is the printable version.

How do I convert between yeast types?

Formulas on this site are written in instant dry yeast because it is the most predictable and it can go straight into the flour. Two multipliers convert it:

• Active dry yeast = instant weight x 1.25
• Fresh cake yeast = instant weight x 3

Two handling differences matter as much as the weights. Active dry yeast wants rehydrating in a portion of the recipe water at around 100F for 10 minutes before it joins the flour, because its granules are larger and a proportion of the cells are dead. Instant yeast is milled finer and goes in dry. Fresh yeast is crumbled into the water and dissolves immediately, and it has a working life of about two weeks in a fridge, which is why almost nobody outside a pizzeria uses it. The yeast type comparison works through the trade-offs.

What happens when a formula has oil and sugar in it?

Nothing changes structurally, they simply join the total percentage. A New York style formula with 2 percent oil and 1 percent sugar has a total percentage of 100 plus 63 plus 2.5 plus 0.3 plus 2 plus 1, which is 168.8, so the multiplier is 1.688.

For four 400 g New York balls, 1,600 g of dough:

• Flour: 1,600 / 1.688 = 947.9 g
• Water at 63 percent: 597.2 g
• Salt at 2.5 percent: 23.7 g
• Instant dry yeast at 0.3 percent: 2.8 g
• Olive oil at 2 percent: 19.0 g
• Sugar at 1 percent: 9.5 g

Add the rounded figures and you get 1,600.1 g, one tenth of a gram over. That is not a mistake, and the next section explains why.

Why do my numbers not add up exactly?

Because six numbers each rounded to one decimal place can accumulate up to about half a gram of drift in either direction. In the New York example the unrounded components are 947.867, 597.156, 23.697, 2.844, 18.957 and 9.479, which total exactly 1,600.000 g. Round each one and you get 1,600.1 g. In the four ball Neapolitan example the same thing happens in the other direction: 595.947 plus 387.366 plus 14.899 plus 1.788 is exactly 1,000.000 g, and the rounded versions total 999.9 g.

The practical rule: a discrepancy of a few tenths of a gram is rounding, and a discrepancy of several grams is an error. If your components are out by 5 g or more, the usual causes are a mistyped percentage, a total percentage that forgot to include the flour's 100, or a hydration figure applied to the total dough weight instead of the flour weight. That last one is the classic beginner mistake: 65 percent of 1,000 g is 650 g, which would be a batter, not a dough.

When it comes to actually weighing, take the drift out of the flour, never out of the salt or the yeast. Flour is the largest number in the formula, so a tenth of a gram there is invisible. The same tenth on a 1.8 g yeast weight is a 5 percent change in fermentation rate.

What sanity checks should I run before mixing?

• Do the components add back to the total dough weight? Within a few tenths of a gram. This catches almost every arithmetic error in one step.
• Is flour written as 100 percent? If a formula shows flour at anything else, it is not a baker's percentage formula and the rest of its numbers mean something different.
• Is hydration inside the range for the style? 58 to 65 percent Neapolitan, 60 to 65 New York, 70 to 80 Detroit and pan, 75 to 85 Roman al taglio. Well outside those and either the recipe is unusual or the conversion went wrong.
• Is salt between 2 and 3 percent? 2.5 percent is the working default. Under 1.5 percent the dough tastes flat and ferments too fast. Over 3.5 percent it tastes salty and the yeast is being suppressed hard.
• Does the yeast match the schedule? 0.3 to 0.5 percent instant for a same-day dough, 0.05 to 0.2 percent for a 24 to 72 hour cold ferment. A same-day dose on a two day schedule is the single most common cause of over-fermented dough.
• Does the ball weight suit the pizza size? Roughly 2.2 g per square inch for Neapolitan, 2.6 for New York, 3.5 for pan.

What gear do you need to make the arithmetic real?

None of this survives contact with volume measures. A 0.1 g resolution scale is the difference between a formula and a hope, because the yeast figures in every table above sit between 0.3 g and 3.0 g and a whole-gram scale cannot resolve them. A bench scraper divides a bulk mass into equal balls cleanly, which matters because a formula built on 250 g balls only works if the balls are actually 250 g. And a graduated container or a proofing container with moulded volume marks turns the rise into a reading instead of an estimate.

Flour choice is the one thing a formula cannot tell you. The same numbers behave differently in different flours, because protein content sets how much water the dough can actually hold. A 12.7 percent protein bread flour is the right choice for New York style and for anything baked at 550F on a home oven steel. Caputo Pizzeria 00 is milled for long fermentation at very high heat and is the reference flour for Neapolitan dough in a 750F oven or hotter. A supermarket all-purpose at around 10.5 percent protein will feel slacker at the same written hydration than either of them, which is why two people can run the identical formula and get different doughs.

Write your formula down as percentages rather than as weights, and it becomes portable. Two balls or twenty, 12 inch or 16 inch, a friend's kitchen or your own: the percentages stay, the total dough weight changes, and one division gets you the flour figure that everything else hangs off.