Pizza Dough Calculator

In short Pizza dough is sized by THICKNESS FACTOR — the weight of dough per square inch of base, conventionally quoted in OUNCES per square inch. A 12 inch round is 113 square inches, so at a factor of 0.09 the ball is 10.2 oz, which is about 289 g. Multiply the area of the pan by the factor and you have the ball weight, and because the factor stays constant the crust comes out the same whatever size you make. Around 0.085 to 0.10 gives a thin New York style base, 0.10 to 0.13 something thicker, and deep dish goes higher again; it is a preference rather than a standard, and finding your own is most of learning to make pizza consistently. The reason this matters more than it sounds is that dough scales with AREA, not with diameter, and almost everybody gets that wrong. Going from a 12 inch pizza to an 18 inch is one and a half times the width but 2.25 times the dough. A 16 inch needs 1.78 times what a 12 inch does, not 1.33 times. Scale by diameter and the bigger pizza comes out noticeably thinner every time — which is exactly the mistake that makes a scaled-up recipe fail. Two practical notes. Rectangular trays are simply width times length, so a 12 by 16 inch tray is 192 square inches and the same factor applies. And dough sticks to bowls, hands and scrapers, so if you need exactly this many bases, add two or three per cent to the total rather than weighing out precisely and coming up short on the last one.