
How to Ball Pizza Dough: Shape, Seal and Cover
To ball pizza dough, weigh the portions, tuck the edges underneath and round each piece gently.
Ninety percent of a great wood-fired pizza is decided before the oven is even lit. This collection covers the dough side of the craft: flour choice and protein content, hydration levels that suit a blistering-hot floor, yeast quantities that actually match your ferment time, and the difference between a same-day dough and one that rested three days in the fridge. Every formula here is written in baker's percentages alongside gram weights, so you can scale from two dough balls to twenty without guessing. We state water temperatures, ambient assumptions, and target dough-ball weights explicitly — and when a shortcut costs you flavor or oven-spring, we say so plainly.

To ball pizza dough, weigh the portions, tuck the edges underneath and round each piece gently.

Cold-ferment pizza dough in a refrigerator at 40°F (4°C) or below for roughly 24 to 72 hours.

For six 275 g Neapolitan-style dough balls, mix 1,000 g flour, 620 g water, 28 g salt, and 1 g instant dry yeast.

Pizza dough hydration is the water weight divided by the flour weight, multiplied by 100.

Start pizza dough troubleshooting with when the problem appeared: mixing, rising, shaping or topping.