The Numbers Behind Every Pizza Style, Compared in One Chart

The Numbers Behind Every Pizza Style: A Pizza Dough Comparison Chart

Switching from a Neapolitan pie to a Detroit pan pizza is not a topping change. It changes every number in the dough: water moves by double digits, the flour changes type, the oil column goes from empty to near double digits, and the oven target moves by hundreds of degrees. Most style guides never show you this. They hand you one recipe at a time, so you can bake a decent Neapolitan and a decent Detroit without ever seeing what actually differs between them.

Every pizza dough, whatever the style, can be described with six numbers: hydration, flour protein, salt, oil, fermentation window, and bake temperature. Put the six major styles on one grid and pizza stops being a stack of separate recipes and becomes a system of related ratios you can navigate in any direction. This pizza dough comparison chart is that grid. Below it you will find the causal logic behind each column, the way the numbers constrain each other, and a method for steering one base dough toward any style in a home oven.

The chart: six styles, six numbers

*The Neapolitan row is the one to read differently. *

A quick primer so the table is usable even if you have never worked in baker's percentages. Because the numbers are relative, the chart scales to any batch size without changing a single percentage. It also means the numbers only mean something in grams, so weigh your flour rather than scooping it.

Read the table in two directions. Scan a row and you see one style's whole character: lean and dry and blazing fast for Neapolitan, wet and oiled and slow for Detroit. Scan a column and you see the trend that runs through all six styles, which is where the real lessons live.

Notice which columns swing wide and which barely move. Salt sits inside a one-point band and oil moves in deliberate small steps. The wide columns define the styles; the narrow ones fine-tune them. PizzaPlan stores each of these target sets as a style preset, so the row you pick turns into exact gram amounts for your batch size instead of numbers you have to convert yourself.

Nothing else on the table moves that far.

More water produces a lighter, more open, airier crumb, because steam generated during the bake leavens the interior before the crumb sets. Less water produces a crisper, more cracker-like structure and a dough that handles easily. The trade is direct: every step toward open crumb is a step toward sticky dough that resists shaping. Moving hydration even three or four points visibly changes how a dough feels and bakes, which is why the chart gives ranges rather than single values.

Two cautions apply before you pick a number. First, hydration can never be chosen in isolation from oven temperature, because the hotter the oven, the lower the hydration target (the bake temperature section covers why). PizzaPlan adjusts water in real time for your kitchen's humidity and temperature rather than treating the chart value as fixed.

If your dough regularly turns out too wet to shape, that is a hydration mismatch you can see in advance on this chart, not a problem to bury under handfuls of bench flour.

Flour protein: the number that moves in lockstep with water

Protein is hydration's structural partner. More water in the dough requires more gluten strength to hold it, so the two columns must be read as a pair.

The chart's flour column follows the structural demands of each style. Neapolitan dough is built on Italian type 00, while New York and the pan styles call for bread flour at 12-14%, the strength that carries a longer, cooler bake. The counterintuitive entry sits at the thin end of the chart: cracker-style wants less protein, not more. Extra protein means extra chew, which is the opposite of what a cracker-style crust is trying to achieve, which is why the bar row drops to all-purpose flour.

This also dissolves a common myth. It is not the "00" label that makes Neapolitan dough work; it is the protein percentage and W-strength range behind the label. That matters because "00" is a grind specification, and flours carrying it vary in strength. Pick flour by matching its protein number to your target hydration, never by brand loyalty. If you want to compare specific brands on protein and style fit, we have a flour brand comparison by protein and style that lines up popular options.

Neapolitan vs New York dough hydration: two rows, side by side

The chart shows exactly where they separate.

The real differences sit in the other columns. Flour diverges: type 00 for Neapolitan versus bread flour at 12-14% for New York, because the New York dough has to survive a longer bake at a lower temperature.

The fermentation column explains the flavor gap. Close in hydration, different clocks.

The biggest separator of all is bake temperature: 800-900°F against 500-600°F. That single column difference is what produces a soft, blistered, fold-in-half crust in one style and a crisper, golden, structured crust in the other. Two styles can look similar and sit far apart in the numbers. The chart makes that distance visible at a glance.

Detroit vs Sicilian dough: same pan shape, different numbers

The pan-style confusion is even more common. Detroit and Sicilian are both rectangular, both baked in oiled metal, both cut into squares, so "pan pizza" gets treated as one category with one recipe. The chart rows refuse that idea.

Oil is the headline differentiator.

The timing column matters more for pan bakes than people expect, because the ferment happens largely in the pan. Swap one dough into the other's schedule and you will pull a pan that is either slack and over-proofed or tight and under-risen. The numbers will not cooperate.

If you are setting up your first pan bake, the Detroit style guide for home ovens walks through pan choice and timing in detail. PizzaPlan keeps every pan style as its own preset, with tailored fermentation, hydration, and ingredient profiles for each, precisely so these two rows never get merged.

Salt, oil, and the small percentages that separate styles

Water and heat grab the attention, but salt and oil move in small increments with outsized effects, and they are where styles are quietly distinguished from one another.

Oil is the clearest lean-versus-enriched marker on the whole chart. It is absent from Neapolitan, minimal in New York, moderate in Sicilian and Roman, and heavy in Detroit and bar doughs. Oil coats gluten strands and interrupts their bonding, so a crust softens and enriches as the percentage climbs. Where the oil column climbs and where it stays near zero maps directly onto each style's texture identity: crisp-and-lean at the top of the table, tender-and-rich at the bottom.

Salt does double duty as flavor and fermentation control, which is why it should be read next to the fermentation column rather than alone. Salt is a baker's percentage like everything else, so when you are working in grams these are concentrated levers: a quarter-point of salt in a 1,000 g flour batch is 2.5 g, and it is noticeable. The working rule for the whole chart is to change small-percentage numbers in small steps. Hydration gives you wide swings to play with; salt and oil do not.

Why bake temperature sets every other number

One relationship organizes the entire chart: the hotter your oven, the lower your hydration. As the hydration guide at sourdoughratio.com states it, "the hotter your oven, the lower the hydration." The reasoning behind the rule is evaporation physics. Ultra-high heat sets a crust in seconds and drives off water fast; carry too much water into that environment and the dough never cooks through. Low-heat ovens work the other way: they give water time to leave at a manageable rate, so they can carry much higher hydration, and too little water in them leaves a crust dry and toughened before it browns.

Follow the bake temperature column down the table and the hydration column follows it, with pan styles as the visible exception that proves the mechanism. That is why the chart pairs every temperature target with an expected duration rather than listing temperature alone.

The practical consequence is uncomfortable but freeing: your oven, not your preference, decides the hydration band you can realistically work in. Pick bake temperature first, hydration second. A home oven topped out around 550°F with a preheated steel can reach the New York band comfortably; it cannot reach the Neapolitan band, and pretending otherwise is where many disappointing Friday nights begin. The chart gives targets, and your actual kitchen conditions set the fine-tuning.

How the numbers interlock: you can never change just one variable

The deeper truth the chart exposes is that the six numbers form a coupled system. Raise hydration and flour strength may need to follow. Add oil and fermentation behavior shifts, because enriched doughs move differently than lean ones. Lower bake temperature and you have to re-choose water, flour, and oil along with it.

Run one worked chain to see the coupling in action. Suppose you want Neapolitan flavor but your oven tops out at 550°F. Dropping from 850°F to 550°F stretches the bake from about 90 seconds to several minutes. One edit, and the row has quietly become New York. This is not a compromise; it is the correct adaptation, and it is exactly why the two rows sit near each other in hydration yet differ everywhere else.

This is also why recipe-format thinking fails when tweaked. A recipe is a single frozen point in a six-number system, not a safe base for casual edits. Most bad dough days, the sticky batch, the tough crust, the undercooked center, are mismatched number combinations that were visible in advance on the chart, not technique failures.

Recalculating a whole row by hand every time one input changes is the tedious part, and it is what PizzaPlan automates: change the style, the dinner time, or the kitchen conditions, and every other number recalculates as a set.

Adapting a base dough toward any style in a home oven

The chart turns style adaptation from guesswork into a sequence. Work through the columns in the order they constrain each other:

1. Set bake temperature first. Decide what your setup can genuinely sustain: steel or stone at your oven's maximum for round pies, or a pan on a lower rack for the pan styles.
2. Choose hydration inside the band that temperature supports.
3. Match flour protein to that hydration. Higher water wants 12-14% bread flour; the cracker-thin end of the scale drops to all-purpose.
4. Add oil last, to the percentage your target row calls for, since oil is the final texture adjustment rather than a structural one.

To move toward bar style instead, water drops into the mid 50s, flour drops to all-purpose, oil climbs toward double digits, and the dough is sheeted thin. Same base, two destinations, and the chart tells you exactly which cells changed. For pan work, the math for matching dough weight to pan dimensions is covered in how to scale pizza dough for any pan size or style.

Bookmark the chart, because it is a permanent reference rather than a one-time read. Once the six numbers are visible side by side, style choice becomes a decision about positions on a spectrum: how much water, how much structure, how much enrichment, how much time, how much heat. Plan your pizza night, and let the calculator carry the numbers from the chart into your mixing bowl.