Pizza Dough Hydration: The Right % for Every Style
August 24, 2026
Your first “authentic Neapolitan” attempt probably went one of two ways: a dough so wet it glued itself to the counter and tore when you stretched it, or a crust that came out of the oven pale and dense as a cracker. Either way, the culprit was almost certainly hydration — the weight of water relative to the weight of flour — and the internet’s advice about it is contradictory enough to fail you in both directions at once.
Here’s the number that surprises people: the official Neapolitan specification is drier than most pizza blogs claim. And the second surprise: the “correct” hydration isn’t a property of the pizza style at all — it’s a property of the style and your oven together.
What hydration means (60 seconds)
Hydration is a baker’s percentage: water weight ÷ flour weight × 100. A dough with 1,000 g of flour and 620 g of water is at 62% hydration, regardless of batch size. More water means a stickier, more extensible dough that bakes into a lighter, more open crumb; less water means an easier-to-handle dough that bakes up denser and crisper. That’s the whole trade-off — everything else is deciding where on that line your style and oven should sit.
The chart: hydration by pizza style
These are the same numbers behind the style presets in our pizza dough calculator — pick the style there and it fills in the percentages and does the gram arithmetic for you.
| Style | Hydration | Salt | Oil | Character |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Neapolitan | 62% | 2.8% | none | soft, puffy cornicione; 60–90 s in a very hot oven |
| New York | 63% | 2.2% | 2% | foldable slice; oil keeps it tender in a slower bake |
| Sicilian | 68% | 2% | 3% | thick, airy pan pizza |
| Detroit | 70% | 2% | 3% | open, focaccia-like crumb; crisp fried edge |
| Roman (teglia) | 78% | 2.2% | 4% | very open, almost ciabatta-like tray pizza |
The pattern is no accident: the styles baked directly on a blazing oven floor sit near 62%, and hydration climbs as the pizza moves into an oiled pan, gets thicker, and bakes longer.
The official Neapolitan number is lower than you’ve heard
The AVPN — the Naples association that maintains the official Neapolitan pizza regulations — doesn’t state a hydration percentage at all. Its disciplinare prescribes 1 litre of water to 1,600–1,800 g of flour, “depending on the degree of absorption.” Run the division and that’s 55.6% to 62.5% hydration — the famous soft, pillowy Neapolitan crust comes from a dough on the dry side of what most home-baking articles recommend.
Plenty of reputable sources quote Neapolitan at 65% or even 70%+ — and the disagreement is real, not sloppy. The higher numbers describe pizza napoletana contemporanea, the modern high-hydration Naples style, and home-oven adaptations. The traditional spec stays low because the pizza bakes in 60–90 seconds at 430–480 °C; there’s simply no time for extra water to escape, and a wetter dough would come out gummy. Our calculator’s Neapolitan preset uses 62% — the top of the official band, chosen because it’s the most forgiving point that’s still within spec.
The AVPN’s other numbers are worth pinning down too, since they anchor the calculator’s defaults: 40–60 g of salt per litre of water (roughly 2.2–3.75% of flour — the preset’s 2.8% is mid-band), dough balls of 200–280 g (the default is 250 g), no oil in the dough, and only a tiny amount of yeast — as little as 0.1–3 g of fresh yeast per litre for an 8–24 hour fermentation. That’s why the calculator defaults to just 0.3% instant yeast: pizza dough gets its flavour from time, not from yeast quantity.
Your oven matters as much as the style
Here’s the part most hydration charts skip: those percentages assume the oven the style was designed for. A domestic oven at 250 °C bakes a pizza in 7–10 minutes, not 90 seconds — and as Ooni’s hydration guide and The Pizza Heaven both explain, a longer bake evaporates far more water from the dough. Bake a spec-compliant 58% Neapolitan dough for nine minutes and it dries into cardboard.
So the practical rule inverts the purist one: the cooler and slower your oven, the wetter your dough should be. Baking Steel’s home-oven testing lands on 60–70% as the home sweet spot, creeping to 70%+ on a preheated steel with strong bread flour. A reasonable cheat sheet:
- Wood-fired or pizza oven (400 °C+, 60–90 s bake): stay at 58–62%.
- Home oven + steel or stone (250–290 °C): 62–70%.
- Pan styles in any oven (Detroit, teglia): 70%+ — the oiled pan does the handling for you, which is exactly why the wettest styles are pan styles.
Flour matters too: the AVPN specifies strong 00 flour (W 280–320), and stronger flours absorb more water. If you’re on ordinary all-purpose flour, knock 2–3 points off any target before you start blaming your technique.
From percentage to grams
Hydration is a ratio, so turning it into a recipe takes one more step. Say you want the calculator’s default batch — four 250 g balls at 62% hydration, 2.8% salt, 0.3% instant yeast. The percentages total 165.1, so of the 1,000 g of dough, flour is 1,000 ÷ 165.1 × 100:
| Ingredient | Baker’s % | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Flour | 100% | 606 g |
| Water | 62% | 376 g |
| Salt | 2.8% | 17 g |
| Instant yeast | 0.3% | 1.8 g |
| Total | 165.1% | 1,000 g |
That divide-by-the-percentage-sum step is where mental arithmetic gives out — which is what the pizza dough calculator is for: set the number and weight of your dough balls, drag the hydration slider, and read off grams. It works in US or metric units, and a 1.8 g yeast measurement should convince you to weigh rather than scoop — our cups to grams converter covers the ingredients a scale-less recipe leaves you converting.
Two adjacent numbers will improve your pizza more than another hydration tweak. Water temperature controls how fast the dough ferments — the dough temperature calculator tells you what temperature to use for a target final dough temp. And if you ferment with a starter instead of commercial yeast, the sourdough calculator handles the flour and water already inside it, which trips up hydration math more than anything else in baking.
The takeaway: pick your hydration for your oven first and your style second — the official Neapolitan number only works in a Neapolitan oven.