DoughPlan

Detroit Style Pizza Dough: Hydration, Pan Size and Timing

By Josep Mampel Marques, updated

Detroit-style pizza dough is a wet, oiled pan dough. Ooni's hydration guide puts it at 70% to 80%, and Ooni's Detroit recipe uses 74%: 350 g of bread flour, 260 g of water, 20 g of olive oil, 10 g of salt and 3 g of instant yeast for one pizza in its 10 by 13 inch pan. That is about 643 g of dough, or roughly 4.9 g per square inch of pan. DoughPlan has no pan presets yet, but you can plan a Detroit dough in the planner by entering these numbers by hand, as shown below.

Ooni's Detroit-style recipe in baker's percentages

IngredientGramsBaker's % (our arithmetic)
Strong bread flour350 g100%
Water260 g74.3%
Extra-virgin olive oil20 g, plus more for the pan5.7%
Fine sea salt10 g2.9%
Instant yeast3 g (or 4.5 g active dry, or 9 g fresh)0.86%

Ooni proofs the dough at room temperature for about 3 to 4 hours, until doubled, then rests it in the oiled pan for about 30 minutes. As an alternative it refrigerates the dough for 72 hours and takes it out 2 to 3 hours before cooking. It bakes with the stone at about 650 °F (340 °C), warns not to go above 700 °F (370 °C) with the pan, and bakes for 10 to 15 minutes.

Other sources go lower on water: Gozney's hydration guide says Detroit "will require a hydration level of around 65%". Ooni itself describes a 70% dough as "sticky and loose, making it trickier to shape and handle for beginners", so a few points less water is a reasonable first step if 74% feels unmanageable.

How much dough for a Detroit pizza

Pan pizzas are sized by area, not by diameter. Using the density of Ooni's recipe (643 g for a 10 by 13 inch pan, about 4.9 g per square inch), other common pan sizes need:

PanAreaDough
8 × 10 inch80 sq inabout 396 g
9 × 13 inch117 sq inabout 579 g
10 × 13 inch130 sq inabout 643 g
10 × 14 inch140 sq inabout 692 g
12 × 12 inch144 sq inabout 712 g

This is straight arithmetic from one recipe, so treat it as a starting point. Note that Ooni lists its pan as 10 by 13 inches but the finished pizza as 9 by 13. Measure your own pan across the bottom. For a thicker or thinner crust, adjust the weight up or down.

How to plan a Detroit dough in DoughPlan today

The planner thinks in round dough balls, but the maths is the same for a pan. Enter one "ball" with the weight of your pan's dough:

  1. Open the planner and pick when you want to eat.
  2. Choose any style, then overwrite the fields: number of pizzas 1, dough ball weight 643 (or the figure for your pan from the table above), hydration 74, salt 2.9, oil 5.5, sugar 0.
  3. Choose "Room temperature only" and set the hours you want, or "Cold, in the fridge" for 1 to 4 days.
  4. Read "Divide and shape into balls" as "press the dough into the oiled pan". The final proof then happens in the pan.

The planner adds 1.5% for dough lost to the bowl, so 643 g becomes 653 g of dough with about 357 g of flour.

About the yeast

Here our model and Ooni's recipe disagree, and you should know why:

So for a short same-day Detroit dough, Ooni's tested recipe is the safer guide. For longer fermentations of 8 hours or more, or a 1 to 4 day cold ferment, the planner is on firmer ground.

When will DoughPlan support pans?

We would like to add pan presets that calculate the dough from the pan size (Detroit, Sicilian, Roman teglia), but there is no date for them yet. Until then, the method above works. For round pizzas, see New York-style dough or pizza dough for an Ooni, and for hydration across styles, the hydration chart.

Sources