Pizza dough hydration calculator
A wood-fired oven at 450 °C bakes a pizza in ninety seconds, so a wetter dough steams and puffs before it can dry out — 60 to 62% works. A home oven at 250 °C takes eight minutes, and the same dough dries into a cracker. Raising hydration to 65% and using a steel rather than a stone compensates for the missing heat. The dough is not the variable; the oven is.
Neapolitan pizza dough runs at 58–62% hydration, and a home oven benefits from 65%. Six hundred grams of flour at 62% takes 372 g of water and 15 g of salt, which makes roughly four 250 g dough balls.
How to build pizza dough
Pizza is salted harder than bread — 2.5 to 3% against 2% — because the dough is thin and eaten with strongly flavoured toppings. Salt also slows fermentation, which is useful when a dough is going to sit in the fridge for two days. That long cold ferment is where most of the flavour comes from: the same ingredients fermented for three hours make a perfectly edible and completely forgettable base.
Questions
58–62% for a very hot oven, 65% for a domestic one. Higher hydration compensates for lower heat.