A pizza dough recipe written in baker’s percentages tells you its proportions, whatever the batch size. Flour is the 100% baseline, and everything else is measured against it: 70% water means the water weighs 70% as much as the flour. If a recipe uses two flours, say 00 and semolina, add them together; their combined weight is the 100%.
That one convention lets you scale a recipe for any number of pizzas, compare doughs from different books at a glance, and catch mistakes. Modernist Pizza’s team recorded more than 1,800 recipes from nearly 400 cookbooks in metric weights and baker’s percentages so they could compare them, and found that a surprising number of printed recipes contained typos.
From grams to percentages
Divide each ingredient by the total flour weight and multiply by 100. Here’s Ken Forkish’s 24- to 48-hour pizza dough from The Elements of Pizza:
| Ingredient | Weight | Calculation | Baker’s % |
|---|---|---|---|
| 00 flour | 500 g | 500 ÷ 500 | 100% |
| Water | 350 g | 350 ÷ 500 | 70% |
| Fine sea salt | 13 g | 13 ÷ 500 | 2.6% |
| Instant yeast | 1.5 g | 1.5 ÷ 500 | 0.3% |
| Dough | 864.5 g | 172.9% |
Forkish divides that 864.5 g into three regular dough balls (or five thin-crust ones), each for a home-oven pizza.
A worked example: from percentages to grams
The Pizza Planner’s Neapolitan-style dough for a home oven is almost the same formula: 70% water, 3% salt and 0.3% instant yeast for a dough that spends about 24 hours in the fridge. The salt is higher than in Forkish’s version: 3% is the level he uses in his AVPN-inspired Saturday dough, against 2.6% here. Say you want three 12-inch pizzas. The Planner portions a 12-inch Neapolitan-style pizza at 250 g of dough, so you need 750 g.
- Add up the percentages. 100 + 70 + 3 + 0.3 = 173.3%.
- Find the flour. Divide the dough you want by that total: 750 ÷ 1.733 = 432.8 g of flour.
- Multiply out the rest.
- Water: 432.8 × 0.70 = 302.9 g
- Salt: 432.8 × 0.03 = 13.0 g
- Yeast: 432.8 × 0.003 = 1.3 g
- Check the total. 432.8 + 302.9 + 13.0 + 1.3 = 750.0 g, which is three 250 g balls.
These are the Planner’s numbers for this pizza, which it rounds the way you’d weigh them: 433 g flour, 303 g water, 13 g salt and 1.3 g yeast.
Step 2 is what makes this work. If you start from “500 g of flour” instead, you get whatever dough that makes, 866.5 g here, and then divide it up. Working back from the dough weight gives you exactly the balls you need. For how much dough each size of pizza takes, see how many pizzas you get from 500 g of flour.
Scaling a recipe
Because the percentages never change, scaling is one multiplication. Modernist Pizza calls it a recipe conversion factor: divide the dough you want by the dough the recipe makes, multiply the flour by that factor, then work every other ingredient out from the new flour weight. To get four balls instead of three from Forkish’s dough, the factor is 4 ÷ 3, so the flour becomes 500 × 4 ÷ 3 = 666.7 g, and the water 70% of that, 466.7 g.
Yeast types
Swapping yeast is a change of percentage, not of method. The Planner uses Modernist Pizza’s equivalence: instant yeast does the work of about one and a third times its weight in active dry yeast, or three times its weight in fresh yeast. So 0.3% instant yeast becomes 0.4% active dry or 0.9% fresh. Follow the maker’s directions for rehydrating active dry yeast, taking that water from the recipe’s total.
Preferments
The flour and water in a poolish or a sourdough levain are part of the dough, so they count toward the totals. With 30% of the flour in a poolish at 100% hydration, the poolish holds 30% flour and 30% water, and the final mix adds the other 70% flour and 40% water. The dough is still 70% hydration. The Planner does this subtraction for you when you add a preferment, and the poolish and biga guide covers when to use one.
The numbers that matter in a pizza dough
Water sets how the dough handles and bakes. The Planner’s styles run from 60% (Roman tonda, and Neapolitan-style for an outdoor oven) through 64% (New York) and 70% (Neapolitan-style in a home oven) to 73.5% (Sicilian-style) and 75% (Detroit). The hydration guide explains why.
Salt seasons the crust. Modernist Pizza settles on 2 to 2.5% as the right amount for seasoning and notes that Naples pizzaioli range from 1.5% to 3.5%. Its advice is to control fermentation with the yeast or the dough temperature rather than the salt. The Planner’s styles use 2% to 3%. Always weigh salt: Modernist Pizza lists a tablespoon of Diamond Crystal kosher salt at 9.6 g and one of Morton kosher salt at 17.63 g, nearly twice as much. More in salt in pizza dough.
Yeast depends on time and temperature, so the percentage only makes sense next to its schedule. Forkish’s doughs show the range:
| Forkish dough | Instant yeast | Schedule |
|---|---|---|
| Enzo’s pizza dough | 0.02% | 20 minutes in bulk, then 10 hours as dough balls, at room temperature |
| Saturday pizza dough | 0.06% | 2 hours in bulk, then 6 hours as dough balls, at room temperature |
| 24- to 48-hour dough | 0.3% | 2 hours in bulk, then 16 to 48 hours in the fridge |
| 48- to 72-hour New York dough | 0.24% | 2 hours in bulk, then 48 to 72 hours in the fridge |
| Saturday pan pizza dough | 0.4% | 4 hours in bulk, then 30 minutes in the pan |
These percentages are calculated from the gram weights in each recipe; a few of the percentages printed in the book’s tables differ from them, the kind of slip that working the numbers yourself catches.
The Planner uses 0.3% for its overnight schedule (about 24 hours in the fridge), 0.24% for its 48-hour schedule and 0.06% for most same-day doughs. Same-day dough for an outdoor Neapolitan-style bake uses 0.44%, and the same-day pan doughs, which follow King Arthur’s recipes, use 0.83% for Detroit and 1.11% for Sicilian-style.
Oil is optional in most pizza doughs. Modernist Pizza found pizza “remarkably forgiving” of fat: oil coats the gluten strands and makes the dough more extensible, and within a reasonable range it’s a matter of taste. In the Planner, the Neapolitan-style, New York and Sicilian-style doughs have none, the Roman tonda has 2.7% and the Detroit 4.2%.
Weighing small amounts
A kitchen scale that reads to 1 g is fine for flour, water and salt. Yeast is another matter: 1.3 g is a typical amount for three pizzas, and Forkish’s slow doughs use 0.1 to 0.5 g for a whole batch. A pocket scale that reads to 0.01 g handles that; a reading of 0 on a kitchen scale doesn’t mean you can leave the yeast out.
Sources
- Ken Forkish, The Elements of Pizza (2016), chapter 6: reading the recipe tables (baker’s percentage), and the Saturday, Enzo’s, 24- to 48-hour, 48- to 72-hour New York and Saturday pan pizza doughs.
- Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, Modernist Pizza (2021), volume 1, pages xxii–xxiv (yeast conversions, salt by volume, scaling with a recipe conversion factor), 313–317 (salt, fat and oil) and 320–321 (the recipe database).
- King Arthur Baking: Weeknight Detroit pizza and Sicilian-style pizza recipes.