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Pizza Dough by Baker's Percentage: Flour Is 100, Everything Else Is a Share
Sep 7, 2026 · Zelpura Editorial · All guides
Pizza dough stops being mysterious when you stop thinking in packets. A baker's percentage sets flour at 100 and writes water, salt and yeast as shares of that flour. Hydration is the water share. Sixty-two percent means 62 grams of water for every 100 grams of flour. This page starts from the other end, which is how a cook actually plans: how many pizzas, how many grams of dough each, what hydration, what salt. It then backs into flour so the finished dough balls hit the weight you asked for. The yeast share in the formula is small, about 0.2 percent of flour, which is an instant-yeast sketch for a same-day dough, not a sourdough and not a two-day cold ferment. If you ferment longer, you will want less yeast than a sketch that assumes you are baking sooner.
The inputs are the job, not a formality. Pizzas and grams per pizza set the total dough. A 250 to 280 gram ball is a common neighborhood for a 12 inch pie, and your peel and your appetite may disagree. Hydration is a percent. Higher hydration is stickier and, in skilled hands, more open. It is not automatically better in a home oven that cannot get hot enough. Salt is a percent of flour, often around 2 to 3. The page also reserves a small yeast percent. If you use a preferment or a starter, this yeast line is the wrong model. Use the page for straight doughs, and use your starter's own math when the leavening is alive in a jar.
Four pizzas at 260 grams is 1,040 grams of dough. At 62 percent hydration and 2.5 percent salt, plus a little yeast, the flour is the remainder after those shares are accounted for — the page divides total dough by 1 plus the percentages. Water is 62 percent of that flour, salt 2.5 percent, yeast a fifth of a percent. Weigh them. Cups will lie, and pizza dough is one of the places the lie is visible in the oven. If the dough feels stiff, your flour may have wanted more water, or the kitchen is dry. Add water by grams, a little at a time, and write down what you added. Next time the hydration field should be the truth, not the first guess.
The miss is using a yeast packet because the packet exists. A packet is sized for a loaf timeline, not for four pizzas and a 24 hour fridge nap. Too much yeast in a long ferment tastes tired and can overproof. The second miss is measuring salt by the pinch after you carefully weighed the flour. Salt is structure and flavor. Weigh it. The third miss is a dough weight that does not match the peel. A 400 gram ball on a small peel is a folding accident. Decide the pizza size first, then the dough weight, then the formula. Starting from 'a bag of flour' is how you end up with six uneven pies and a bowl you are proud of for the wrong reason.
Pick the number of pizzas you can bake before the oven loses the plot. A home oven often wants you to bake in a sequence, not all at once. Type a dough weight you have used, or 260 if you have not. Set hydration to something you can handle. Sixty-two is a sane start. Seventy is a project. Weigh into a bowl, mix until it is a dough, and give it the time the yeast percent assumed. If you are cold-fermenting overnight, reduce yeast rather than trusting a same-day sketch. The page will not scold you. The dough will, by blowing past the container.
This is a formula sketch, not a baking guarantee. Flour protein, water temperature, and oven heat change the result. Nothing here is food-safety advice. Dough left out too long in a hot kitchen is not a badge of authenticity. If you are feeding people with gluten restrictions, this recipe is the wrong recipe. A percentage will not remove gluten. It will only make the gluten more consistent.
Write the flour, water, salt and yeast you actually weighed on the bag or in a note. Tomorrow's dough should start from that note, not from memory of a good pie. If the crust was tight, raise hydration a point or two next time. If it was soupy on the peel, lower it or improve the shaping, which is a skill, not a percentage. The calculator gets you to a repeatable dough. Repetition is how pizza stops being a performance and starts being dinner.
Read the result back before you act. Say flour, water, salt, yeast as four weights. If one of them is 'a packet' or 'a pinch,' you are not on this page's method yet. Weigh the pinch once so you can stop pinching.
Oven setup is the other half. A dough formula cannot invent a stone that is actually hot. Preheat longer than you think, and do not judge the pie by the first one if the stone was still waking up. The second pie is the one that tells you whether the hydration was right. The first pie tells you whether you were impatient. Those are different lessons, and only one of them belongs in the hydration field.
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