Pizza Dough Salt and Yeast Ratios: Both Published Figures, and the Thirtyfold Gap

Here is everything both documents publish for these two ingredients, alongside our conversion to a percentage of flour weight. The conversions matter because per litre figures cannot be scaled: baker's percentage can.

The salt division, shown. The EU regulation specifies 50 to 55 g of sea salt against 1.8 kg of flour for the same litre of water. 50 divided by 1,800 is 0.028, so 2.8 percent. 55 divided by 1,800 is 0.031, so 3.1 percent. The AVPN specifies 40 to 60 g against a flour range of 1,600 to 1,800 g, so its true bracket runs from 40 divided by 1,800, which is 2.2 percent, up to 60 divided by 1,600, which is 3.75 percent.

The yeast division, shown. The EU regulation's flat 3 g against 1,800 g of flour is 3 divided by 1,800, which is 0.17 percent. The AVPN's low end of 0.1 g against 1,800 g is 0.006 percent, and its high end of 3 g against 1,600 g is 0.19 percent. Because the AVPN says dry yeast is one third of fresh, the dry equivalents of its range work out at roughly 0.002 to 0.06 percent of flour weight. All of those divisions are ours; neither document prints a percentage anywhere.

Salt is often described as a flavour ingredient, and in a four ingredient dough it obviously is one. But both documents treat it as structural, and the AVPN's own material describes salt acting on the gluten network. That is the reason its published range is tight while the yeast range is enormous: salt is a property of the dough, not a schedule setting. Change it and you change what the dough is, not when it is ready.

Three consequences follow from that, and they explain most salt related dough problems.

Salt tightens the dough. Because it acts on the gluten network, a dough at the top of the published band is firmer and more resistant than the same dough at the bottom. If your dough fights you and snaps back the moment you stop stretching, salt is one of the two or three things worth checking, alongside the rest fully covered in why does my pizza dough spring back. If your dough is slack and difficult to handle, moving up within the band tightens it, which is a gentler correction than dropping hydration.

Salt slows the yeast. The two ingredients pull in opposite directions, which is exactly why the EU regulation is so particular about keeping them apart during mixing. A dough with salt at the top of the band ferments more slowly than the same dough at the bottom, so if you change your salt figure you have implicitly changed your fermentation timing too.

Salt is stable, so set it and leave it. Both bands overlap between roughly 2.8 and 3.1 percent of flour weight, and anything in that overlap satisfies both authorities. Unlike yeast, there is no reason to move it around from bake to bake. Weighing it is easy: any kitchen scale reading to 1 g handles a salt quantity in the tens of grams comfortably, and the same scale does the flour and water. The comparison is in best kitchen scales for baking.

Now the headline disagreement. The EU regulation names one number, 3 g per litre. The AVPN names a range from 0.1 to 3 g per litre. The AVPN's top end is the EU regulation's only end, and its bottom end is one thirtieth of that. Two authorities on the same style, a factor of thirty apart.

The explanation is that yeast is not a fixed ingredient at all, it is the dial that sets fermentation speed. Yeast quantity and fermentation time are inversely related: more yeast means the dough is ready sooner, less yeast means it takes longer to get to the same place. So a recipe cannot specify a yeast quantity without also specifying a schedule, and the two documents are describing different schedules.

Look at what each one says about time and it falls into place. The EU regulation describes a first rise of two hours under a damp cloth, then a second stage of four to six hours at room temperature, which is a total of six to eight hours, a same day dough. At that speed you need a working quantity of yeast, and 3 g per litre, our 0.17 percent of flour, is that quantity. The AVPN's website recipe instead specifies leavening of a minimum of 8 and a maximum of 24 hours. Over 24 hours, 3 g of yeast would be far too much, and the 0.1 g figure at the bottom of its range, our 0.006 percent of flour, is the setting that makes a long rise work.

So the correct way to read the two documents is not "which one is right" but "which schedule am I on". Choose when you want to bake, then choose the yeast quantity that gets you there. That relationship, and the fact that neither authority endorses the 48 or 72 hour cold ferment that internet recipes routinely recommend, is the subject of cold ferment vs same day pizza dough.

The published figures on both documents are for fresh brewer's yeast, which is not what most home bakers have in the fridge. Here is what the AVPN publishes for the alternatives.

Dry yeast is one third of the fresh quantity, per the AVPN's own recipe page. Applied to its range, the dry equivalents come out at roughly 0.002 to 0.06 percent of flour weight, which is our conversion of its 0.1 to 3 g against its 1,600 to 1,800 g of flour. Notice how small the low end has become. A third of 0.1 g is a quantity that is difficult to describe as a weight at all at domestic scale.

Mother yeast, meaning a sourdough starter, is specified at 5 to 20 percent of the flour used. That looks wildly inconsistent with the numbers above until you remember what a starter is: mostly flour and water with a comparatively small population of organisms in it. You are adding a large weight to contribute a small biological effect, which is the reverse of commercial yeast. Note also that a starter at 20 percent of the flour weight brings its own water with it, so it moves your effective hydration as well, a knock on effect covered in pizza dough hydration explained.

One thing neither document does is publish an instant yeast conversion, so we are not going to invent one. If your packet gives a manufacturer's own fresh to instant conversion, use the manufacturer's figure and say where it came from.

This is the most practical single instruction in either document and it is almost never repeated in home recipes. Commission Regulation (EU) No 97/2010 does not describe mixing as a free-for-all. It prescribes a sequence, verbatim: "Pour a litre of water into the dough kneader, dissolve in a quantity of between 50 and 55 g of sea salt, add 10 % of the prescribed total quantity of flour, then add 3 g of brewer's yeast." Water, then salt, then a first tranche of flour, then the yeast. In that order.

The consequence is that the yeast never meets undissolved salt. By the time it goes in, the salt is in solution and diluted through a full litre of water, and there is already flour in the bowl. The failure mode the order avoids is the one home bakers fall into naturally, which is tipping salt and dry yeast together into the bottom of a mixing bowl and then getting distracted before the water goes in. Follow the regulation's sequence and the problem cannot arise.

The regulation is equally specific about the mixing itself: kneading for 20 minutes at low speed. Low speed is the operative part. A dough worked hard and fast heats up, and the same regulation specifies a fermentation temperature of 25°C, so a dough that leaves the mixer well above that has started its rise on the wrong setting before the timer even starts. Twenty minutes at low speed on a stand mixer is a real duty cycle, and the machines that handle it without complaint are in best stand mixers for pizza dough.

Since the regulation names a fermentation temperature, it is worth actually knowing your dough's temperature rather than guessing at it. An instant read probe thermometer pushed into the centre of the ball tells you where you are against that 25°C figure in a couple of seconds, and it is the only way to know whether your dough is fermenting at the specified temperature or several degrees above it. Keeping the balls at a stable temperature while they do it is what a proofing box is for, and the rest of that kit is in best pizza dough tools.

Here is a piece of arithmetic that decides whether you can follow the AVPN's recipe at all, and it is not a matter of opinion.

The AVPN's minimum yeast figure is 0.1 g of fresh yeast per litre of water. A kitchen scale with 1 g resolution cannot weigh 0.1 g. It is below the resolution of the instrument. A 1 g scale will read 0 for it, and will keep reading 0 as you add more, until at some point it flips to 1. There is no technique that makes this work, no tare trick that recovers a tenth of a gram from an instrument that only counts whole ones. If your scale reads in whole grams, an AVPN minimum yeast dough is not a recipe you can execute, you can only approximate it and hope.

That matters more than it sounds, because yeast is the one ingredient where a small absolute error is an enormous proportional one. An error of 1 g on 28 g of salt is under 4 percent and invisible in the finished pizza. An error of 1 g on 0.1 g of yeast is a factor of eleven, and it turns a 24 hour dough into something that is over risen and spent long before you get to it. Even at the EU regulation's much larger 3 g figure, a 1 g scale is coarse: a single gram of error there is a third of the entire quantity.

The fix is one instrument. A scale with 0.01 g resolution reads a tenth of a gram with two digits to spare, and a small 0.01 g pocket scale does the same job in a drawer for very little. You still want an ordinary kitchen scale for flour and water, because a precision scale has nowhere near the capacity for a kilogram of flour. Two scales is the honest answer to a recipe whose ingredients span four orders of magnitude, from 1,800 g of flour down to 0.1 g of yeast.

Once the ratios are settled, the two numbers that finish the formula are hydration and dough ball weight, and both are derived and sourced on their own pages: pizza dough hydration explained and how much dough per pizza. The flour that all these percentages are percentages of is chosen in pizza flour protein content, and what happens to the finished dough in the oven is on our temperature chart.