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A regular-crust 14-inch pizza takes about 15 ounces of dough, a 12-inch takes 11 and a 16-inch about 19.5. Those are the late Tom Lehmann’s numbers from his Pizza Today column on scaling any size of pizza, and every one of them comes from the same two steps: work out the area of the pie, then multiply it by a thickness factor. The factor is ounces of dough per square inch, and it is the only number on your dough sheet that should change with the crust style. If your sizes were picked one at a time, they probably don’t share one.
One number per crust, multiplied by the circle
Lehmann, a director at the American Institute of Baking whom the trade called the Dough Doctor, laid out the method plainly. Bake a test size until the crust is right. In his example, 11 ounces on a 12-inch pie, divided by its 113.04 square inches, gives 0.0973106 ounces of dough per square inch. A 14-inch pie has 153.86 square inches, so it gets 14.97 ounces, rounded to 15. Area is 3.14 times the radius squared. That’s the whole formula.
He published the other two styles the same way. For a thin crust, 10 ounces on a 12-inch pie works out to 0.0885. For a thick crust, he told a PMQ Think Tank reader that 14 ounces is typical for a 12-inch thick crust, a dough factor of 0.1238938.
The table, with the arithmetic shown
Each cell is area times Lehmann’s factor, rounded to a tenth of an ounce. The arithmetic is ours.
| Pie | Area (sq in) | Thin (×0.0885) | Regular (×0.0973) | Thick (×0.1239) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10” | 78.5 | 6.9 oz | 7.6 oz | 9.7 oz |
| 12” | 113.0 | 10.0 oz | 11.0 oz | 14.0 oz |
| 14” | 153.9 | 13.6 oz | 15.0 oz | 19.1 oz |
| 16” | 201.0 | 17.8 oz | 19.6 oz | 24.9 oz |
| 18” | 254.3 | 22.5 oz | 24.8 oz | 31.5 oz |
Worked once: an 18-inch pie has a 9-inch radius. Nine squared is 81, times 3.14 is 254.34 square inches, times 0.0973 is 24.75 ounces. Lehmann rounded his own 16-inch to 19.5 ounces, so round to whatever your scale and your crew can hit every time.
A flour mill’s chart lands in the same neighborhood. General Mills’ foodservice pizza product guide says a 16-ounce ball of its All Trumps flour dough makes a 12-inch thick crust, a 14-inch hand-tossed or a 16-inch thin. Divide 16 ounces by each area and the mill’s implied factors are about 0.142, 0.104 and 0.080. That’s a wider spread than Lehmann’s, from a company that sells flour, but a useful sanity check.
The one-ounce-per-inch rule thins out your big pies
Lehmann did offer a shortcut: 1 ounce of dough per inch of diameter for any size up to 16 inches. It’s a starting weight for one test size. Applied to every size, it breaks. Ten ounces on a 10-inch is 0.127 ounces per square inch. Sixteen ounces on a 16-inch is 0.080. That’s about 60% more dough per square inch on the small pie, so your 16-inch is a different crust wearing the same name.
One Think Tank poster ran 9 ounces on a 12-inch and 14 on a 14-inch and couldn’t stop the skins tearing. Lehmann’s fix was to put both sizes on one consistent dough loading, raising the 12-inch to 10 ounces, because a slightly heavier piece opens to size without tearing.
There’s an oven reason too. Matched loading means pies of different sizes “will have a similar baking time regardless of size (within reason),” Lehmann wrote, which is what you want on a conveyor with one belt speed.
Your dough sheet should have one number per crust. Every other weight on it is arithmetic, and arithmetic doesn’t have bad days.
A heavy ball costs pennies in flour and dollars in consistency
WebstaurantStore lists a 50-pound bag of All Trumps at $39.99, about 80 cents a pound. In General Mills’ New York thin recipe, 50 pounds of flour makes an 82-pound, 2-ounce batch, so flour is about 61% of the dough’s weight. That’s roughly 3 cents of flour in every ounce of dough.
A shop making 1,000 balls a week, each an ounce heavy, is scaling about 62 extra pounds of dough a week. That’s about $30 of flour a week, or about $1,580 a year, before oil, yeast and the labor to mix it. Our arithmetic, at one dealer’s list price. Swap in your invoice.
It isn’t the big leak. Dave Ostrander’s line to Pizza Today put the two ingredients side by side: “a penny an ounce for dough and a dime or more an ounce for cheese!” That was 2011, but the ratio is the point. Dough is the cheap ingredient. You weigh it for the bake, the stretch and the pie that looks the same on Tuesday as on Friday. Cheese is where portioning pays. The scale also needs a routine around it: Lehmann had dough scaled, balled and in the cooler within 20 minutes of the mixer, and a biga changes the arithmetic by adding water you have to count.
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The limitation: a thickness factor measures dough per square inch, not how thick the crust bakes. Lehmann gave the same 0.1239 for a 12-inch thick crust and a 12-inch cracker crust, and hydration, sheeting and proof decide which one shows up on the plate. He said himself: “There is no one factor that can be used across the board.” Pizza Today columnist Laura Meyer prefers 12 to 13 ounces for a 12-inch New York pie, heavier than his regular. Nobody publishes a survey of the factors working shops use, so these are where your test bake starts, not where it ends.
Common questions
How much dough do I need for a 14-inch pizza?
About 15 ounces for a regular crust, 13.6 for thin and 19 for thick, using the thickness factors Tom Lehmann published in Pizza Today and on PMQ's Think Tank. Treat those as starting points and test-bake your own.
How do I figure dough ball weight for any pizza size?
Work out the pie's area: 3.14 times the radius squared. Multiply it by your thickness factor, the ounces of dough per square inch. Lehmann's method is to bake a 12-inch pie until you like it, then divide that ball's weight by 113 to get the factor.
Does one ounce of dough per inch of pizza work?
Only as a place to start. Lehmann suggested it for one test size up to 16 inches. Use it for every size and the big pies come out much thinner: a 10-ounce 10-inch carries about 60% more dough per square inch than a 16-ounce 16-inch.
How much does an overweight dough ball cost?
Not much in flour, about 3 cents an ounce at a WebstaurantStore listing of $39.99 for 50 pounds. Run 1,000 balls a week an ounce heavy and it's about $1,580 a year in flour alone. The bigger cost is pies that bake and stretch differently.
