👋 About Jordy

Hi, I'm Jordy. I'm a Dutch guy who got seriously into making pizza at home, and that hobby eventually turned into this website.

How this site started

A few years ago I started baking pizza more seriously. I quickly found out that the difference between a decent pizza and a great one lives almost entirely in the dough — the flour ratios, the hydration, the fermentation time, the yeast amount. Tiny shifts in those numbers change everything.

So I did what everyone does: I went looking online for a pizza dough calculator. Something that could take my pizza style, how many balls I wanted, and the time I wanted to eat, then work backwards and tell me exactly how much flour, water, salt, and yeast to weigh out.

I couldn't find one that actually worked the way I wanted. Most were either too basic (just flour + water + salt), too clunky, or locked behind signups and paywalls. A few got close but missed the timeline part — which is the whole point when you're working with 24 or 48 hours of cold fermentation.

So I built my own.

What this calculator is

Jordos Pizza Calculator is the tool I wish had existed when I started. It handles 5 pizza styles (Neapolitan, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Vito's double-ferment), 4 yeast types, 3 pre-ferments (poolish, biga, sourdough), and gives you a backwards-from-dinner timeline so you know exactly when to start mixing.

It's free, there's no signup, no ads, and it works on any device. No paywall is ever going to appear. I built it for myself first, and I figured other home pizza makers would want the same thing.

My kit

The hardware I actually bake with at home:

What's next on the wishlist

I'm currently saving hard for a proper spiral dough mixer. Kneading 2-3 kg of dough by hand is honest work, but a real mixer would change what I can do — bigger batches, consistent results, and the freedom to experiment with very high hydration doughs that are brutal to knead by hand. If you have strong opinions on Famag vs Bernardi, I'd love to hear them.

Why I keep this calculator free

Home pizza making is already expensive once you factor in a decent oven, a pizza peel, good flour, and San Marzano tomatoes. The last thing anyone needs is another monthly subscription for math. Everything on this site stays free. There are some Amazon affiliate links on the gear pages — if you buy through them I get a small cut at no cost to you. That's how the server bills stay paid.

What I'm not

I'm not a trained pizzaiolo. I haven't worked in a pizzeria. Everything on this site comes from baking at home over many weekends, reading books (Ken Forkish, Kenji López-Alt, Elements of Pizza), watching a lot of Vito Iacopelli videos, and running the numbers myself to understand why a recipe works.

If I get something wrong, I want to hear it. Nothing on this site is handed-down wisdom I can't defend with baker's math.

How I tested the calculator

The numbers in the fermentation calculator come from a grid I built by cross-checking three sources: published yeast-time-temperature tables from professional sources (Forkish, Modernist Pizza), the math behind yeast activity at different temperatures, and what I see on my own counter. Where two sources disagreed, I went with what matched my fridge and my kitchen.

The grid I use for the fermentation timing tool covers 8 temperatures (2-26°C) and 9 time points (3-72 hours). The numbers match what professional sources publish, and where they disagreed I went with what worked on my own counter and in my own fridge. The interpolation between grid points is bilinear — same approach a baker uses mentally when they extrapolate from a recipe they know.

The hydration calculator is calibrated against the styles I actually bake, with the texture descriptions matching what the dough feels like in my hands. A 65% Neapolitan and an 80% focaccia feel completely different — the slider tries to make that visible before you commit to a 24-hour cold ferment.

Six mistakes I see beginners make

These are not abstract — they're the patterns I keep seeing in pizza forums, Reddit threads, and DMs. Most of them I've made myself at least once.

1. Measuring flour with cups. A "cup of flour" is anywhere from 120g to 160g depending on how packed it is. A digital scale costs €10 and removes the single biggest source of inconsistency. Once you switch, you never go back.
2. Tap water at the wrong temperature. Cold tap water (15°C) into the flour can mean the dough is below activation temperature for an hour. Lukewarm water (28°C) is the right place to start in winter; in summer cold water keeps the dough from over-fermenting on the counter.
3. Confusing salt with extra salt. "2.5% salt" means 2.5% of flour weight, not 2.5% of dough weight. For 500g flour: 12.5g salt. People who use 2.5% of dough weight end up adding 50% more salt than they meant to.
4. Stretching the dough too cold. Cold dough fights you. Pull it from the fridge 1-2 hours before you want to shape — it should be at room temperature, soft, and slack. Stretching cold causes tears and uneven thickness.
5. Adding flour during the stretch. Every gram of dusting flour you add changes the hydration of the bottom crust. Use semolina sparingly; better yet, use a bench scraper to move the dough without touching the sticky side. High-hydration doughs reward technique over flour-dusting.
6. Underestimating the oven. A home oven at 250°C is not a pizza oven at 450°C. Neapolitan-style dough wants 90 seconds at 450°C+; in a home oven it will be 6-8 minutes at 250°C, and that means a different style — closer to New York than to Neapolitan. The calculator adjusts hydration and oil for what your oven can actually do. Match the style to the heat you can deliver.

Get in touch

Found a bug in the calculator? Disagree with something in a guide? Have a pizza question I haven't covered? The thumbs-down button on any AI-generated content on this site logs straight back to me, but the easiest way is to open an issue on GitHub or send a message through the contact link in the footer.