FIELD NOTES / pizza
Pizza dough hydration, without the guesswork
Understand baker's percentages, choose a manageable dough and scale the flour and water for your next pizza night.
Hydration is the weight of water divided by the weight of flour, multiplied by 100. A dough with 500 g flour and 300 g water has 60% hydration. It does not mean that 60% of the finished dough is water. Gozney's explanation of baker's percentages uses the same flour-first calculation.
Start with a dough you can handle
Ooni suggests 60% as a starting point in its hydration guidance. Wetter dough can be stickier to handle. There is little benefit in chasing a high percentage if the dough keeps sticking to your peel.
For your first batch, follow one complete manufacturer recipe rather than combining its hydration with a different recipe's yeast dose and proving schedule. Note the flour, room temperature and result. Change one thing next time so you know what helped.
Scale the whole dough, not just the water
In baker's percentages, flour is always 100%. Salt and yeast are also measured against flour. To calculate a batch of a chosen weight, add those percentages before dividing the total dough weight.
For a deliberately simple arithmetic example, 1,000 g of dough at 60% water, 2.5% salt and 0.5% yeast gives a total multiplier of 1.63. Flour is 1,000 ÷ 1.63, or about 613.5 g; water is about 368.1 g, salt 15.3 g and yeast 3.1 g. This illustrates the maths, rather than prescribing a fermentation recipe.
Use the pizza dough calculator to scale your chosen formula. If using a starter, its flour and water belong in the totals too.
Keep the recipe's proving instructions
Hydration alone cannot tell you when dough will be ready. Use the yeast type, temperature and proving method in your recipe. A backwards schedule helps reserve time; it does not measure fermentation.
These measurements work throughout the UK. Outdoor-oven positioning and fuel requirements are model-specific: follow your oven manual wherever you cook.