About The Dough Formula

Who's behind this site

Hi, I'm Zack Pearson. I started baking bread during the pandemic, when a lot of us suddenly had time on our hands and a sourdough starter on the counter. What began as a way to fill long quiet weekends turned into a real obsession with dough, fermentation, and the small variables that separate a flat loaf from a beautiful one.

I built thedoughformula.com to organize what I was learning. The calculator started as a spreadsheet on my laptop, then a web page when I got tired of opening the spreadsheet, then a real tool once I realized other home bakers might use it too.

Eventually my baking pulled me toward pizza, which lives in the same world as bread but with stricter rules: shorter bake times, hotter ovens, and a finished product where the crust is half the experience. That side of my baking grew large enough to deserve its own home, so I built thepizzadoughformula.com to focus on pizza dough specifically. This site stays focused on bread.

Why this calculator exists

Most bread recipes are written for one specific style at one specific weight. The moment you want to scale up for a dinner, switch from sourdough to baguette, or work with a poolish, you have to redo the math yourself. I wanted a tool that handled the math in the background and let me focus on the dough.

The calculator uses baker's percentages, which is the same system professional bakers use. Every ingredient is expressed as a percentage of flour weight, so scaling a recipe is just multiplication. Once you see the percentages alongside the weights, the patterns behind each style start to make sense on their own.

What you'll find here

• A calculator with style presets for sourdough, baguette, focaccia, sandwich loaf, ciabatta, brioche, no-knead, and a custom builder
• Preferment support for poolish, biga, and levain with hydration math handled automatically
• A Desired Dough Temperature calculator so you can hit your fermentation target every time
• 22 long-form guides on fundamentals, techniques, ingredients, styles, and troubleshooting
• 60 recipe pages organized by style, hydration, and schedule
• No account, no paywall, no popups

How the site stays free

The site is supported by display advertising. The ads do not influence which techniques are recommended in the guides, which calculator defaults are set, or anything else about the content. The calculator and the guides will stay free.

Get in touch

Feedback, bug reports, and bread questions are all welcome. The contact page has details, or you can email me directly at admin@thedoughformula.com.