How Much Dough Per Pizza: The Weight Table, With the Arithmetic Shown

We are going to do this in public, because the whole value of the table below is that you do not have to take our word for it.

Step one, the published figures. Commission Regulation (EU) No 97/2010 specifies that the dough balls for Pizza Napoletana must weigh between 180 and 250 g. The same regulation specifies that the finished pizza must not exceed 35 cm in diameter. Both figures are in the regulation's own text. Nothing so far is ours.

Step two, the area. 35 cm is 13.78 inches, so the radius is 6.89 inches. The area of a circle is pi multiplied by the radius squared, so the area is pi multiplied by 6.89 squared, which is 149 square inches.

Step three, the division. The regulation's lightest permitted ball spread over its largest permitted pizza is 180 divided by 149, which is 1.21 g per square inch. Its heaviest ball over the same area is 250 divided by 149, which is 1.68 g per square inch. Rounded, that is the band this page runs on: 1.2 to 1.7 g of dough per square inch of finished pizza. That division is ours. The regulation does not publish a rate, it publishes a weight and a diameter, and the rate is what falls out when you put them together.

Every row here is the same two multiplications: area, then area multiplied by the rate. The area column is printed on purpose so you can check any line with a calculator. All of it is our arithmetic, derived from the EU regulation's published figures.

Look at the 13.8 inch row, because it is the audit. 35 cm is the regulation's own maximum diameter, and at our derived rate that row returns 180 to 250 g, which is the regulation's own published dough ball range, exactly. That is not a coincidence and it is not us being clever; it is the row the rate was derived from, fed back through the method. We print it because a derived table that could not reproduce its own source row would be broken, and showing that it does is the only honest way to ask you to trust the other five rows.

The other thing that table teaches is worth internalising: dough requirement does not scale with diameter, it scales with area, which grows with the square of the radius. A 16 inch pizza is only a third wider than a 12 inch one, but it needs roughly 78 percent more dough, because 201.1 square inches against 113.1 is nearly double the surface. This is the single most common scaling error people make, and it is why stretching a 12 inch ball to 16 inches does not give you a thin crust, it gives you a pizza with holes in it. That failure is covered in why does my pizza dough tear.

Now the part most dough weight tables leave out. The two authorities that define Neapolitan pizza do not publish the same dough ball weight.

Commission Regulation (EU) No 97/2010 specifies dough balls of 180 to 250 g. The AVPN's own website recipe page specifies dough balls of 200 to 280 g. Same style, same 35 cm maximum diameter, two different weight ranges from two bodies that both have standing to define it. The AVPN figure is 20 g heavier at the bottom and 30 g heavier at the top. They overlap, but they are not the same specification, and there is no version of the arithmetic that makes them agree.

Run the AVPN figure through the identical method and here is what changes. 200 g over the same 149 square inches is 1.34 g per square inch, and 280 g over 149 is 1.88 g per square inch. So the AVPN recipe describes a rate of 1.34 to 1.88 g per square inch, which is heavier than the EU rate at both ends. Same diameter, more dough, therefore a thicker pizza. That is not a rounding difference, it is a different pizza, and it is consistent with the other place these two documents part company: as we document on our pizza oven temperature chart, the AVPN specifies a centre thickness of 0.25 to 0.30 cm while the EU regulation specifies 0.4 cm.

We are not going to average them. A table built on 190 to 265 g would be citing a figure neither body ever published, and the difference between the two is exactly the information you need to make a decision. Pick a document and run the whole batch on it.

Both ends of 1.2 to 1.7 g per square inch produce a legitimate pizza. Here is what actually separates them.

Choose the low end, around 1.2 g per square inch, if you want thinner and crisper. Less dough over the same area means a thinner base, a lower rim, less interior crumb to keep steaming, and a crust that goes crisp faster and stays crisp longer. It is the right end if you like a pizza you can hold flat, and it is the more forgiving end in a very hot oven, because there is less mass to get heat through in a bake of 60 to 90 seconds.

Choose the high end, around 1.7 g per square inch, if you want thicker and breadier. More dough over the same area gives you a taller rim, a more open and bready interior, and a pizza that behaves more like bread with toppings than a cracker with toppings. It is also the end to move toward if your pizzas keep tearing, because a heavier ball at the same diameter is stretched less thin and has more margin before it opens up.

Then check it against your bake. A short, very hot bake suits the lighter end, since a thick, wet base can leave the middle underdone before the rim is finished, which is the mechanism behind a soggy middle. A longer, cooler bake, of the kind our temperature chart attributes to New York style at 4 to 12 minutes, has time to cook a heavier base through. Dough weight is a partner to bake time in exactly the way hydration is, which is set out in pizza dough hydration explained.

Nothing in the derivation depends on the pizza being round. The rate is grams per square inch, and a square inch is a square inch, so for a rectangular pan pizza you multiply length by width to get the area and then apply exactly the same grams per square inch. Detroit, Sicilian, Roman al taglio and any home baking tray are all handled by that one substitution: swap pi r squared for length times width, and the rest of the method is unchanged.

Two honest caveats about carrying the rate across. First, the 1.2 to 1.7 band was derived from a Neapolitan specification, and the pan styles it is being applied to are generally thicker by design, so the top of the band is the natural starting point for a pan and the bottom of it will give you something quite lean. Second, pan doughs are usually much wetter: our hydration guide puts Detroit at 71 to 75 percent and Sicilian at 73.5 percent, against 55.6 to 62.5 percent for Neapolitan, and a wetter dough at the same weight spreads further and rises differently. Use the rate to get in the right neighbourhood, then adjust once by feel and write the number down.

For dividing and storing, the tooling matters more than people expect. A bench scraper cuts a clean division without dragging and degassing the dough the way a knife does, and every piece should go on the scale rather than being judged by eye. Once balled, the balls need to sit apart and covered, which is what a dough proofing box or a stack of commercial dough trays exists for. Balls that fuse have to be torn apart, and torn dough stretches unevenly no matter how precisely you weighed it. The wider kit is in best pizza dough tools.

Everything on this page assumes a scale, because a dough weight table is worthless if the balls are divided by eye. Two 12 inch balls at 137 g and 190 g are both defensible pizzas from our table, but they are visibly different pizzas, and that entire difference is inside the margin of a confident guess. A kitchen scale reading to 1 g is all this page needs; if you are mixing large batches, a higher capacity scale saves you weighing flour in stages. The comparison is in best kitchen scales for baking.

Where 1 g resolution stops being enough is not dough weight, it is yeast. The AVPN's web recipe permits as little as 0.1 g of fresh yeast per litre of water, a quantity a 1 g scale cannot register at all, and that arithmetic and its consequences are dealt with in pizza dough salt and yeast ratios. For flour, water and dough balls, 1 g is plenty.

Finally, remember that dough ball weight and fermentation are separate dials. The regulation's ball weight says nothing about how long the ball rests before you stretch it, and the two Neapolitan authorities disagree there too, which is the subject of cold ferment vs same day pizza dough. Get the weight right first, because it is the one variable on the whole page you can fix with a scale and never think about again, then work on the ferment. When it comes time to open the ball, the technique for getting a correctly weighed ball out to its full diameter without tearing is in how to stretch pizza dough.