NY Style
Pizza Dough Calculator

Hydration is the weight of the water as a percentage of the weight of the flour. At 62%, every 1,000 grams of flour gets 620 grams of water. It is the single setting in the Advanced panel that changes the dough most, and it is the one I would tell you not to touch first.

62% is what my recipe has used since 2012. It is slack enough that the ball opens without fighting you, and tight enough that the baked slice holds a fold instead of flopping over. That fold is the whole point of a New York pizza. Everything else about the style is negotiable; that is not.

What happens when you move it

Down around 58%, the dough is noticeably stiffer. It resists stretching, it wants to spring back, and the crust bakes up denser and crisper. Some old-school shops work down here on purpose. If you have been getting a crust that tears while you open it, going lower is not your fix.

Up past 65%, the dough turns sticky and slack. It is harder to move onto a peel, it wants to stick to everything, and the crumb opens up into something lighter and more irregular. That is a good pizza. It is not a New York pizza, and it will not hold a fold. If that is what you are after, you want the Neapolitan calculator, where high hydration is the point rather than a side effect.

So the 58 to 65% range in the Advanced panel is not a technical limit. It is the range where this dough is still the dough I am describing.

Your flour changes the answer

Bread flour absorbs more water than all-purpose, so 62% in bread flour feels tighter in the bowl than 62% in all-purpose. I use all-purpose for this recipe because I like a lighter, airier crust, and higher-protein flours give you more chew. If you are using bread flour and the dough feels stiff, a point or two more water is a more sensible adjustment than changing the recipe.

If you are new to this

Leave it at 62 and make the recipe twice before you start moving numbers. Most of what people try to fix with hydration is actually a mixing, kneading or oven problem, and you cannot tell which is which until you have a baseline to compare against.

Show Advanced opens the baker’s percentages — the amount of each ingredient as a percentage of the flour weight, which is how bakers write formulas. The defaults are my recipe. You can run this calculator for years without opening the panel at all.

Hydration — 62%

The water. This is the one that changes the dough most, and it has its own section above. If you open the panel for one reason, it should be this one.

Salt — 2%

Seasoning, and it tightens the dough slightly. Below about 1.5% the crust tastes flat. I would not move this.

Oil — 1.5%

Tenderness and a little richness. New York doughs run 1 to 3%. More oil gives a softer, slightly shorter crumb. Add it last when you mix, after the flour is fully incorporated, or it interferes with hydrating the flour.

Sugar — 1%

Browning, mostly. A home oven does not get hot enough to colour a crust the way a deck oven does, and a little sugar closes some of that gap. If you are baking in a pizza oven at proper temperatures, you can drop it to zero.

Yeast — 0.4%

Set for a cold ferment of one to three days, which is what this recipe is built around. Use only enough to get the job done — too much yeast makes dough taste bad, and a surprising number of published recipes overdo it. If you are skipping the refrigerator and rising at room temperature the same day, you need considerably more, somewhere around 0.6 to 1%.

Change one thing at a time, and write down what you changed. Two adjustments at once and you will not know which one did what.