Pizza Dough Guides
Flour, water, salt, yeast, and a bit of patience. These guides cover every style and technique for making pizza dough at home.
Pizza Styles
Neapolitan Pizza Dough
Neapolitan dough the way Naples does it: 00 flour, 60-62% hydration, long fermentation, and extreme heat. This guide follows AVPN standards and adapts them for home ovens — including flour brands, fermentation schedules, and a full troubleshooting section.
New York Style Pizza Dough
Big, foldable slices with a crispy bottom and chewy bite. NY-style dough uses high-gluten flour, a touch of oil and sugar, and a 48-hour cold ferment for that classic slice-shop flavor.
Detroit-Style Pizza Dough
Rectangular pan pizza with a shatteringly crispy caramelized cheese edge and an open, focaccia-like crumb. 70% hydration dough, Wisconsin brick cheese, and cold sauce stripes applied after baking.
Roman pizza al taglio
Rome's iconic sheet pizza, sold by weight and eaten standing up. An ultra-light, airy crumb with a crispy bottom, made with poolish and ~80% hydration over 2-3 days.
Sourdough Pizza Dough
Make pizza with your sourdough starter for a crust with real complexity: mild tang, open crumb, and excellent browning. Plan for 8-72 hours of fermentation depending on your schedule.
Where to Start
All Guides
Techniques
No-Knead Pizza Dough
Skip the kneading entirely. Mix flour, water, salt, and a pinch of yeast, then wait 12-18 hours. Time does the gluten development for you, and the crust turns out light and airy with about 5 minutes of actual work.
Overnight Pizza Dough
Mix the dough before bed, refrigerate it, bake pizza the next day. 10 minutes of work the night before, and you get better flavor than same-day dough with zero extra effort.
Pizza dough hydration: complete guide to water ratios
How the water-to-flour ratio shapes your crust. 60% gives you a stiff, easy-to-handle dough; 75%+ gives you open, airy crumb but requires more technique. Includes baker's percentages by style, a decision framework, bassinage technique, and fermentation interaction.
Pizza Dough Fermentation: Room Temperature vs Cold Fermentation
Room temp vs. fridge, 4 hours vs. 72 hours, and how to tell when your dough is actually ready. The time-temperature relationship is the single biggest lever for better-tasting pizza.
Poolish vs Biga: Complete Guide to Pizza Pre-Ferments
Two Italian pre-ferments, very different results. Poolish (liquid, 100% hydration) makes airy, extensible dough. Biga (stiff, 50-60%) makes chewy, structured crumb. Which one you pick depends on your pizza style.
Cold Fermentation Pizza Dough Guide
Slow-rise your dough in the fridge for 24, 48, or 72 hours. The longer it sits, the more complex the flavor gets. Most home bakers hit the sweet spot at 48 hours with 0.1% fresh yeast.
Essential Pizza Equipment: What You Actually Need
Stop wasting money on gadgets. A baking steel and a digital scale are the two upgrades that actually matter. Everything else is just a bonus.
Ingredients
Pizza Flour Guide: 00, Bread Flour, AP & Protein Content
00 vs. bread flour vs. all-purpose: what actually matters is protein content and how it matches your pizza style. Includes W values, brand recommendations, and a style-to-flour matching table.
Pizza water and key ingredients: what actually matters
The stuff beyond flour that quietly affects your dough: water hardness, salt percentage, yeast types (instant vs. fresh vs. active dry), diastatic malt, oil, and why a $15 scale beats measuring cups.
Troubleshooting
Pizza Dough Troubleshooting: Common Problems & Fixes
Dough too sticky? Won't stretch? Bland crust? Tearing during shaping? This guide covers the most common headaches and what's actually going wrong, with quick fixes you can try right now.
Pizza Dough FAQ
Quick answers to 25+ pizza dough questions. How long to let it rise, can you freeze it, what to do when it's too sticky, how to store it. Each answer leads with the "what to do" before the "why."
Pizza Dough Calculator
Plug in how many pizzas you're making and your preferred style. It handles the math for flour, water, salt, and yeast.
Open Calculator