Plan pizza night: pizzas, dough and water temperature
Feeding a crowd is arithmetic before it is cooking: how many pizzas, how much dough for that many, and how warm the water should be so the dough comes out at the temperature you want. This kit does that in four steps, each ready-loaded with a worked example.
It counts and weighs. It says nothing about taste, proving time, oven temperature or food safety, so follow your own recipe for those.
- 4 steps
- About 10 minutes
- Runs on your device; nothing is uploaded
Review status. Not yet reviewed by a specialist in this craft. The arithmetic is checked by tests against independent calculations, but the practical advice is a starting point: if you can improve it, a pull request is welcome (see docs/niche-kits.md in the Toolmoz repository).
Before you start
The boxes are for you while you work. They are not saved and leave this page when you do.
The steps
Count slices and pizzas
Adults and children eat different amounts. The tool adds up each group’s slices, applies your allowance for seconds and rounds up to whole pizzas.
Take from the result: The number of pizzas. That is your number of dough balls.
Example loaded: Family pizza night: 6 adults and 10 children. Six adults at three slices and ten children at two, with a 10 % allowance, on 8-slice pizzas.
Scale the dough
Enter your recipe for the batch it makes and the number you need. The tool multiplies every quantity by the target divided by the original and keeps each unit as written.
Take from the result: The scaled weight of each ingredient. Round the yeast to what your scale can weigh.
Example loaded: Pizza dough for 4 balls scaled to 6. The four-ball dough (600 g flour, 372 g water, 17 g salt, 1.2 g yeast) multiplied by 1.5 for six 250 g balls.
Check the mix
The table shows each ingredient as a share of the whole dough. It is a quick check that a slip while typing has not changed the recipe, and it shows how little of the dough is salt and yeast.
Take from the result: The shares. They are percentages of the total mass, not baker’s percentages: divide an ingredient’s weight by the flour weight for those (here water is 62 % of the flour).
Example loaded: Pizza dough for four, 62 % water to flour. 600 g flour, 372 g water, 17 g salt and 1.2 g yeast, enough for four 250 g dough balls, as shares of the whole dough.
Set the water temperature
Bakers aim for a dough temperature. Three times that temperature, minus the room, flour and mixer friction temperatures, gives the water temperature to use. Replace the example with your own readings.
Take from the result: The water temperature. If it comes out below what the tap gives, cool the water with ice from part of its weight; if it is impractical, cool the flour or the room instead.
Example loaded: Dough at 24 °C in a 22 °C kitchen. Three-factor method: 3 × 24 − 22 (room) − 21 (flour) − 6 (friction) = 23 °C water.
When you have the numbers
What this kit does not cover
- Scaling is linear. A larger batch can need a different mixing and resting time, and a mixer may not cope with the larger mass.
- The water-temperature formula is an empirical rule that depends on your measured friction factor. It is not a heat balance.
- Slice counts are your assumptions about appetite, not nutrition advice.
Sources and further reading
The tools’ own pages explain their methods and list their sources. Presets are worked examples from the Toolmoz repository, each checked against an independent calculation.