Pizza Planner

How the Planner works

It starts from the time you want the first pizza out of the oven and works backward: the bake, the stretch and topping, the warm-up of cold dough (with the oven preheating alongside it), the cold rest, dividing into balls, the first rise and the mix. Every stage has a planning window and a "ready when" cue, because dough runs on temperature and yeast, not on the clock.

The grams come from the style and size you pick. Each style has a typical thickness, so a 14-inch New York pizza gets a bigger dough ball than a 12-inch Neapolitan, and a Detroit pan gets far more dough per square inch than either. The formula is written in baker's percentages and scaled to the number of pizzas.

The bake depends on both the style and the oven. A New York pizza on a home-oven steel bakes for 8 to 12 minutes at 500 to 550°F; a Neapolitan-style pizza in a portable gas oven bakes in a minute or two on a much hotter stone. Some pairings don't work at all: a thick Detroit pan needs a long, moderate bake, so the Planner won't schedule one in a portable oven that bakes in 90 seconds. It offers a home-oven method instead.

Reading the recipe

Baker's percentages express every ingredient as a share of the flour weight, with flour at 100%. For example, four 14-inch New York pizzas on the overnight schedule (pick Overnight above) come to 886 g of flour, 567 g of water (64%), 25 g of salt (2.8%) and 2.7 g of instant yeast (0.3%): 1,480 g of dough, or four 370 g balls. Change the number of pizzas and every amount scales together.

If you use a poolish or a sourdough starter, the Planner counts the flour and water inside it as part of the formula, so the ticket lists the flour and water still to add. Yeast under a gram is shown to a hundredth of a gram; if your scale can't read that, the Planner shows how to dissolve a weighed gram in water and measure out the share you need.

What it assumes

A kitchen around 70°F (21°C) and a fridge around 39°F (4°C). You can change both under "Fine-tune the dough". A warmer kitchen speeds every counter stage up, a cooler one slows it down, so check the "ready when" cues before moving on. The schedules are adaptations of published same-day, overnight and long-cold methods, not predictions of exactly how far your dough will rise.

The sources behind each plan, including Ken Forkish's The Elements of Pizza, Modernist Pizza, King Arthur Baking's Detroit method and the manufacturers' oven manuals, are listed under "What this plan assumes" in the tool.