About The Pizza Dough Formula

Who's behind this site

Hi, I'm Zack Pearson. I started baking bread during the pandemic, when a lot of us suddenly had time on our hands and a sourdough starter on the counter. What began as a way to fill long quiet weekends turned into a real obsession with dough, fermentation, and the small variables that separate a flat loaf from a beautiful one.

That obsession eventually pulled me toward pizza. Pizza dough lives in the same world as bread, but the rules are stricter: shorter bake times, hotter ovens, and a finished product where the crust is half the experience. I spent a couple of years tweaking hydration, trying different flours, and burning through more dough balls than I want to admit before things started to click.

I built thedoughformula.com first as a place to organize what I was learning about bread. As the pizza side of my baking grew, it deserved its own home, so I built thepizzadoughformula.com to focus on pizza-specific recipes, tools, and style guides.

Why this calculator exists

Most pizza dough recipes are written for one specific style with one specific weight. The moment you want to scale up for a party, switch from Neapolitan to New York, or try a poolish, you have to do the math yourself. I wanted a tool that handled all of that in the background and let me focus on the dough.

The calculator uses baker's percentages, which is the same system professional bakers use. Every ingredient is expressed as a percentage of flour weight, so scaling a recipe is just multiplication. Once you see the percentages alongside the weights, the patterns behind each style start to make sense on their own.

What you'll find here

• A calculator with style presets for Neapolitan, New York, Detroit, and more
• Pre-ferment support for poolish and biga
• Humidity adjustment for sticky-dough days
• A volume-to-weight converter for older American recipes
• Printable, shareable recipe cards
• Long-form guides on flour, hydration, cold fermentation, and troubleshooting
• No account, no paywall, no popups

How the site stays free

The site is supported by a few small things: affiliate commissions when readers buy recommended equipment through Amazon and other retailers, and display advertising. None of these influence what gets recommended in the guides or the calculator defaults. If a product shows up in the equipment list, it's because I either own it or have used one. Full details are on the Affiliate Disclosure page.

Get in touch

Feedback, bug reports, and pizza questions are all welcome. The contact page has details, or you can email me directly at [email protected].