Sourdough Clock

Sourdough Pizza Dough Calculator: Ingredients for Any Number of Pizzas

By Tam Vu · Updated

On this page
  1. The math
  2. Worked example
  3. Making more or fewer
  4. Sources

Pizza dough is usually planned backward from how many pizzas you want to make. This calculator takes the number of dough balls and the weight of each, plus your percentages for water, starter and salt, and gives the grams of each ingredient. It does not pick the percentages: those depend on your oven, your flour and your taste.

Pizza dough

The percentages and sizes above are examples, not recommendations. Use your own recipe's.

The math

The percentages are baker's percentages: each is a percent of the flour. Flour is 100%, so all the ingredients together weigh (100 + water % + starter % + salt %) percent of the flour:

flour = total dough weight ÷ ((100 + water % + starter % + salt %) ÷ 100)

Then each ingredient = flour × its percentage ÷ 100. The percentages here count only the flour you add, not the flour and water inside the starter. For the true hydration including the starter, use the hydration calculator.

Worked example

Four dough balls of 250 g, with example percentages of 65% water, 20% starter and 2% salt:

  1. Total dough: 4 × 250 = 1,000 g.
  2. Sum of percentages: 100 + 65 + 20 + 2 = 187%, or 1.87.
  3. Flour: 1,000 ÷ 1.87 = 534.8 g.
  4. Water: 534.8 × 0.65 = 347.6 g. Starter: 534.8 × 0.20 = 107.0 g. Salt: 534.8 × 0.02 = 10.7 g.

Check: 534.8 + 347.6 + 107.0 + 10.7 = 1,000.1 g, which is 1,000 g allowing for rounding.

Making more or fewer

Change the number of balls and everything scales together. Doubling to 8 balls doubles every ingredient, as in the recipe scaler. To work from a recipe you already have in grams, the baker's percentage calculator converts it to percentages you can type in here.

Sources

  • Baker's percentage arithmetic: each ingredient as a percent of flour weight. All numbers above are computed with it.