Baker's Percentage Chart for Pizza Dough

Baker’s percentage expresses every ingredient as a percentage of the total flour weight, with flour itself defined as 100 percent. That single convention is what lets two bakers using completely different batch sizes compare formulas directly, and it is why a pizza formula is written as 100 / 65 / 2.5 / 0.3 rather than as a list of cups. This chart is the printable companion to the dough hydration calculator, and every figure below is produced by the same arithmetic that the calculator runs.

What is the formula, in full?

Four lines, and the first one is the only one people get wrong. You almost never know the flour weight in advance, because what you actually know is how much dough you want, so the flour weight has to be recovered by division.

• Total dough = number of balls multiplied by weight per ball
• Total percentage = 100 + hydration + salt + yeast + oil + sugar
• Flour = total dough divided by (total percentage / 100)
• Every other ingredient = flour multiplied by its own percentage

Worked through on the standard formula: four balls at 250 g is 1,000 g of dough. The percentages sum to 100 plus 65 plus 2.5 plus 0.3, which is 167.8. Flour is 1,000 divided by 1.678, which is 595.9 g. Water is 595.9476 multiplied by 0.65, which is 387.4 g. Salt is 14.9 g and yeast is 1.8 g. Rounded to whole grams that is 596 plus 387 plus 15 plus 2, which is exactly 1,000 g. Always run that check, because the components adding back to the target is the only proof that the arithmetic went the right way round.

What are the total percentages for the common formulas?

This is the table that saves the most time, because the total percentage is the divisor you need and it is tedious to sum by hand at the bench with flour on your fingers. Flour and water columns are for a 1,000 g batch, which is four 250 g balls. For any other batch weight, multiply the flour figure by your batch weight divided by 1,000.

Read down the flour column and the shape of the thing becomes obvious. A fixed 1,000 g of dough contains 643.9 g of flour in a cracker formula and 527.1 g in a wet Roman one, a difference of almost 120 g of flour for the same weight of dough. That is why you cannot take a recipe written for one hydration, add water, and expect the ball count to survive. Every figure is rounded to a tenth of a gram, so an individual row can display a tenth away from its own total.

How do I scale a batch up or down?

Multiply, never re-derive. Percentages are scale free, which is the entire point of the system, so a formula that works for four balls works for forty without any new arithmetic beyond a single multiplication. The table below is the standard formula, 65 percent hydration with 2.5 percent salt and 0.3 percent instant dry yeast, at 250 g per ball.

The waste column is not padding. Dough sticks to the bowl, the bench, the scraper and your hands, and on a 1,000 g batch that lost material is enough to leave the last ball 15 or 20 g light. Add about 2 percent to the target and accept the leftover scrap as the price of hitting every ball on the nose. Ball weights themselves come from area rather than from taste, which the dough ball weight calculator works out for any diameter.

What percentage should each ingredient be?

Only two ingredients in pizza dough have a genuinely wide usable range, water and yeast. The others sit in narrow bands, and moving outside those bands is almost always a mistake rather than a style choice.

True Neapolitan uses none of the optional four. Flour, water, salt and yeast is the whole formula, which is why the style is so unforgiving: there is nothing in it to hide behind. Oil and sugar earn their place in cooler ovens, where the bake runs minutes rather than seconds and the crust needs help to stay tender and to brown. Above roughly 700F, sugar starts working against you and scorches the rim before the base has set.

How do the yeast conversions and schedules line up?

Every yeast percentage on this site is the instant dry figure. Active dry needs roughly 1.25 times that weight and fresh yeast roughly 3 times, so 2 g of instant is about 2.5 g of active dry or 6 g of fresh. The schedule columns come from the same fermentation model the proof time calculator uses, where activity doubles for every 17F rise in dough temperature.

Look at the right hand column and the reason cold ferment recipes call for so little yeast becomes obvious. At 0.30 percent a fridge dough is finished in about half a day, long before you intended to bake it, which is why a same day dose in a three day schedule produces flat, alcoholic balls. Weighing 0.42 g of anything requires a 0.1 g scale , which is the practical reason that scale is the first purchase in home pizza rather than an optional refinement. A finer breakdown by dough temperature is on the fermentation time chart.

How do preferments and sourdough fit the same arithmetic?

They do not change the formula, only the order of operations. Calculate the complete formula first, exactly as written above, then move a share of the flour into a preferment along with the water that matches that preferment’s own hydration, and hold everything else back for the final mix. Totals are unchanged, so the finished dough is still at the hydration you chose.

A poolish is 100 percent hydration, equal weights of flour and water, and typically takes 20 to 40 percent of the total flour. A biga is 45 to 55 percent hydration, much stiffer, and typically takes 30 to 50 percent of the total flour. On the standard 1,000 g batch, a 30 percent poolish would take 178.8 g of the 595.9 g flour and 178.8 g of water, leaving 417.2 g of flour and 208.6 g of water for the final dough. The poolish and biga calculator does that split and reports what is left.

Sourdough works the same way with one extra subtraction. A starter at 100 percent hydration is half flour and half water by weight, so 200 g of starter contributes 100 g of flour and 100 g of water to the formula and both have to come out of the calculated figures. Skip that step and the dough lands several points wetter than intended, which is the usual explanation for a sourdough pizza that will not hold a shape.

What are the classic mistakes with baker’s percentage?

Four of them, and between them they account for nearly every batch that comes out unexpectedly. Each one has a signature you can recognise without re-running the arithmetic.

• Water taken as a percentage of the finished dough. Produces a dough about 10 points drier than intended, stiff and tearing. The fix is to work from flour, always.
• Flour measured by volume. A packed cup carries up to 20 percent more flour than a spooned one, so the same recipe becomes a different dough every session.
• Salt measured by spoon. Fine table salt and flaky kosher salt differ by nearly a factor of two by volume. Fifteen grams is fifteen grams either way.
• Yeast scaled to the wrong schedule. The most expensive mistake, because it only shows up three days later when the balls are already spent.

When a batch comes out wrong, re-derive the total percentage first and check that the four component weights add back to the batch total. If they do, the arithmetic is fine and the problem lies in temperature, timing or flour, which are separate chapters. The baker’s percentage guide walks the algebra slowly, and the hydration chart gives the water figures at every percentage from 50 to 90.