Baker's Percentages for Pizza Dough

Flour is the anchor

In baker's math, total flour equals 100%. If a dough has 1000g flour and 640g water, the hydration is 64%. If it has 25g salt, the salt is 2.5%. This is why percentages feel odd at first: the total formula can add up to more than 100%, because every ingredient is being compared to flour, not to the finished dough weight.

• Remember it this way: flour is the ruler, not the total.
• Use total flour when you blend flours, such as 800g 00 plus 200g bread flour.
• A 1% change equals 10g per 1000g flour, which is easy to visualize.

Why it matters when scaling

A cup-based recipe can drift as soon as you make more or fewer pizzas. Baker's percentages keep the dough character intact. If hydration, salt, oil, and yeast stay in the same relationship to flour, a two-pizza batch and a ten-pizza batch behave like the same dough instead of two different recipes.

Preferments still count

Poolish, biga, and levain are not separate bonus doughs. Their flour and water are part of the final formula. If 30% of the flour is in a poolish, that flour still belongs to the total 100%, and the water in the poolish still counts toward total hydration. This is the mistake that makes prefermented doughs accidentally too wet or too dry.

Tradeoffs to watch

Percentages describe the formula, but they do not bake the pizza for you. A 65% dough can feel firm with whole wheat, loose with weak flour, easy in a pan, or tricky for a thin round pizza. Use baker's math as the map, then adjust for flour strength, oven temperature, dough style, and your handling skill.

• Higher hydration adds softness and openness, but also stickiness.
• More salt adds flavor and strength, but slows fermentation.
• More yeast adds speed, but shortens the flavor runway.