Pizza Dough Hydration Chart by Style and Batch Size

Hydration is water weight divided by flour weight, expressed as a percentage. That is the whole definition. A dough made with 600 g of flour and 390 g of water is at 65 percent hydration, and it stays at 65 percent whether you make one ball or forty. This page is the printable version of the dough hydration calculator: every figure below comes from the same arithmetic, so the chart and the calculator will never disagree.

What hydration should I use for each pizza style?

Style and hydration are not free choices. Each style is a package of flour, water, ball weight and bake temperature that only works as a set, and the hydration number is the part that decides how the dough behaves in your hands. Use this table to pick the range, then use the batch table further down to turn the percentage into grams.

Two rows in that table deserve attention because they break the pattern people expect. Roman tonda and cracker crust sit at the bottom of the range rather than the top, even though both are thin and crisp. Crispness there comes from a low water content and added fat, not from steam. Everything above 70 percent, by contrast, is either baked in a tray or handled with wet hands, because a dough that wet cannot be picked up and stretched in the air.

How much water is that in grams?

This is the table to keep on the fridge. It assumes the standard supporting formula used across this site, 2.5 percent salt and 0.3 percent instant dry yeast, and it works backwards from a 1,000 g batch, which is four 250 g balls. Flour equals the batch total divided by the sum of all percentages over 100, and every other ingredient is a percentage of that flour weight.

Figures are rounded to a tenth of a gram, so a row can read a tenth away from the batch total. The 65 percent row is the one worth memorising: 595.9 g flour, 387.4 g water, 14.9 g salt and 1.8 g yeast, adding to 1,000.0 g. Rounded to whole grams that is 596 plus 387 plus 15 plus 2, which is exactly 1,000 g. If you instead multiply the already rounded flour figure, 595.9 times 0.65 gives 387.3, so a tenth of a gram either way is display rounding rather than an error in the formula.

Why is a 65 percent dough not 65 percent water?

Because the percentage is measured against flour, not against the finished dough. In a 1,000 g batch at 65 percent hydration the water weighs 387.4 g, which is 38.7 percent of the dough. The last column of the table above exists purely to make that visible, and it is the single most common arithmetic mistake in home pizza. Someone reads 65 percent, takes 65 percent of their 1,000 g target, adds 650 g of water to 350 g of flour, and produces a batter.

The reverse mistake is quieter and more common. Someone calculates water as a percentage of the total dough weight, gets a figure about 10 points too low, and produces a dough that is stiff, tears at the rim and never opens properly. The dough is not wrong for any mysterious reason. It is simply at 55 percent hydration when the recipe said 65.

Baker’s percentage exists to make this unambiguous once you accept the convention. Flour is 100 percent by definition, all percentages sum to more than 100, and the flour weight is recovered by dividing rather than multiplying. The full algebra, including what happens when you add oil, sugar and a preferment, is worked through on the baker’s percentage chart and in the baker’s percentage guide.

How does flour change the hydration you can use?

More than any other variable. Two flours at the same stated protein can absorb noticeably different amounts of water depending on how finely they are milled and how much damaged starch the milling produced, and a difference of two protein points moves the comfortable range by five to ten hydration points. If a dough is slacker than the number says it should be, look at the bag before you blame the scale.

W is the Italian strength rating, measured on a Chopin alveograph, and it tracks how long a dough can ferment before the gluten gives out. A W 260 flour is built for an 8 to 24 hour schedule and a W 320 flour for 24 to 72 hours, which is why long cold ferments call for a stronger flour rather than simply more patience. Named brands and their published figures are collected on the flour protein content chart.

Whatever the bag says, none of it means anything without a scale. Volume measures of flour vary by as much as 20 percent depending on how the cup was filled, which is enough to move a formula ten hydration points without a single change to the recipe. A 0.1 g digital scale is the cheapest large improvement available in home pizza, and it is the purchase that makes every number on this page meaningful. If you are baking above 65 percent, a bench scraper is the second purchase, because wet dough cannot be lifted off a bench by hand without tearing the gluten you just built.

How does the oven change the right hydration?

Water leaves the base during the bake, and how much leaves depends almost entirely on how long the bake lasts. A 900F floor cooks a 12 inch pizza in about 75 seconds and barely touches the moisture in the crumb. A 550F home oven takes about 8 minutes and drives off a great deal, which is why the same formula that produces a light Neapolitan outdoors produces a dry, biscuity base indoors.

The cordierite row looks wrong at first glance and is not. A stone conducts heat into the base far more slowly than steel, so the bake runs longer but gentler, and pushing hydration up on a stone tends to produce a base that steams rather than crisps. On steel the heat arrives fast enough that the extra water becomes oven spring instead of sogginess. That is the same reason a steel is the standard recommendation for a domestic oven, and the trade offs are laid out in the pizza steel roundup. Bake times in that column come straight from the bake temperature and time calculator.

What goes wrong at each end of the range?

Both failure modes are recognisable long before the pizza reaches the oven, which is useful, because both are fixable at the mixing stage and neither is fixable afterwards.

• Too dry, under about 55 percent for a hand stretched pizza. The ball resists opening, springs back to two thirds of the size you stretched it to, and tears at the centre rather than thinning evenly. The baked crumb is tight and bready, and the rim stays small and dense because there was never enough steam to inflate it.
• Too wet for the flour. The ball flattens into a puddle in the proofing box rather than holding a dome, the surface goes slack and shiny, and the dough sticks to the peel no matter how much flour goes underneath. The pizza launches folded or not at all. High hydration is not the enemy here, mismatch is: 70 percent is comfortable in a 14 percent protein flour and unmanageable in a 10.5 percent one.
• Right hydration, wrong technique. Wet dough is handled with wet or oiled hands and a scraper, not with more flour. Every gram of bench flour worked into a 75 percent dough is a gram that lowers its real hydration and leaves raw flour streaks in the crumb.

If the problem is specifically at the launch rather than in the mix, the fix is usually semolina and speed rather than a formula change. The guide to launching without sticking and the launch troubleshooting chart both work through that in order.

How do I move a formula from one hydration to another?

Keep the batch weight fixed and recalculate flour first, because changing hydration changes the total percentage and therefore changes how much flour a fixed batch weight contains. Going from 62 to 68 percent on a 1,000 g batch moves flour from 606.8 g down to 585.5 g and water from 376.2 g up to 398.1 g. Both numbers move. Adding water to an existing dough without dropping the flour gives you a bigger batch at the new hydration, which is fine if you wanted more dough and a problem if you were counting balls.

Change hydration in steps of two or three points, not ten, and change one variable at a time. Bake a batch at 62 percent, then the next at 65, and you will know within two sessions which side of the range your flour, your oven and your hands belong on. That is faster than reading anyone else’s opinion about it, including this one.

Hold back roughly 10 percent of the water at mixing and add it only if the dough wants it. Flour absorbs differently batch to batch and season to season, and that reserve is the difference between a formula and a recipe. Once the water is decided, work out ball weights on the dough ball weight calculator and the schedule on the proof time calculator. Hydration sets the crumb, but temperature and time set the flavour, and they are separate problems.