Baker's Percentage Calculator for Pizza Dough

Baker's percentage (also called baker's math) is a way of writing a dough recipe where flour is always treated as 100%, and every other ingredient — water, salt, yeast, oil, sugar — is expressed as a percentage of that flour weight. It lets you scale a recipe to any batch size while keeping the exact same dough, because the ratios between ingredients never change even when the total weight does.

Because flour is the ingredient every dough is built around, and expressing everything relative to it makes the ratios portable between batch sizes and even between bakers. If percentages were based on total dough weight instead, adding more water would change every other ingredient's percentage too, which defeats the point.

It depends on style and how you're baking. Thinner, home-oven-friendly doughs tend to sit in the high 50s to low 60s; Neapolitan-style dough for very hot ovens is typically around 60-65%; wetter doughs above 70% give a more open, airy crumb but are noticeably harder to shape by hand. The style presets on this calculator are a sensible starting point — adjust the hydration % field and see the new weights instantly.

Much less than most home cooks assume, and it depends heavily on how long you're fermenting the dough for. A same-day dough (6-8 hours at room temperature) commonly uses around 0.4-0.5% instant dried yeast, while a 24-72 hour cold ferment in the fridge can use as little as 0.1-0.15% because the extra time lets a much smaller amount of yeast do the same job while developing more flavour.

Yes. Fresh (cake) yeast is used at roughly three times the weight of instant dried yeast for the same fermentation, and active dry yeast sits between the two at around 1.2 times instant. Select your yeast type on the calculator and the yeast % field updates automatically — you can still edit it by hand afterwards.

Set those fields to 0. Traditional Neapolitan dough uses neither — the calculator handles a 0% entry the same as any other percentage and simply leaves that ingredient's weight at 0.0g rather than treating it as an error.

Change the number of pizzas or the ball weight. Because every ingredient is calculated as a percentage of flour, and flour is worked out from your target total dough weight, scaling to 6 pizzas instead of 4 (or 350g balls instead of 300g) recalculates every ingredient weight in proportion automatically — you never need to do the maths by hand.

Hydration above roughly 70% produces dough that needs a stretch-and-fold technique rather than traditional kneading, plenty of flour or oil on your hands and work surface, and more confidence handling a looser dough. The Assessment panel on this calculator flags this as "Advanced Handling" so you know what to expect before you start mixing, not partway through.

Neapolitan dough is baked very briefly at extremely high temperatures (often 60-90 seconds in a wood-fired or specialist pizza oven), which suits a slightly firmer, lower-hydration dough. New York style is baked longer at lower, more typical home-oven temperatures, and usually includes a small amount of oil and sugar for a more tender, browner crust that holds up to more toppings.

Yes — baker's percentage is a weight-based system, not a volume one (cups of flour vary enormously by how they're scooped). A digital scale accurate to at least 1g is essential, and one accurate to 0.1g is strongly recommended for weighing small yeast and salt quantities correctly.

Yes, and it's a common way to develop more flavour with less yeast. Select "Cold Ferment (24-72h)" as the fermentation schedule and the yeast % updates to a much lower starting point than a same-day dough. Bring the dough back to room temperature before shaping, since cold dough is stiffer and harder to stretch.

Most pizza dough recipes sit around 2-3% salt by baker's percentage. Salt strengthens the gluten structure and controls how fast the yeast ferments, so it's rarely omitted entirely the way oil or sugar sometimes are.

Most straight pizza doughs land somewhere between about 160% and 180% total (100% flour plus roughly 55-75% water, 2-3% salt, a small fraction of a percent of yeast, and 0-3% each of oil and sugar). The Breakdown table on this calculator shows your own total so you can sanity-check it against that range.

The baker's percentage maths itself doesn't change, but how much water a particular flour can absorb does. Stronger, higher-protein "00" or bread flours can often take on more water at the same workability, so if your dough consistently feels too wet or too dry at the hydration this calculator suggests, that's a sign to adjust the hydration % field for your specific flour rather than a sign the formula is wrong.

That's normal and not something to worry about — a 1,200g total dough split across 4 balls is a clean 300g each, but plenty of real batches (for example 3 pizzas from an odd total) won't divide to a whole gram per ball. Weigh the total batch accurately, then divide it into balls by eye or by weighing each ball individually; being a gram or two out on an individual ball makes no practical difference.