The spectrum of pizza
Pizza looks like an infinite category, but almost every style in the world is defined by three knobs: how wet the dough is (hydration), how long it ferments, and how hot it bakes. Neapolitan lives at ~62% hydration and 900°F for 90 seconds. A New York slice is the same dough, cold-fermented longer and baked at 550°F. Detroit pushes hydration to 70% in an oiled steel pan. Roman al taglio goes to 80% and three days in the fridge. St. Louis drops to ~48% and skips fermentation entirely — that's why it's a cracker.
This project aggregates 4,993 pizza recipes from across the web and normalizes each one into baker's percentages, fermentation schedules, bake parameters, and toppings with position. Map every recipe on those axes and the regional map re-emerges on its own — you can see it on the hydration × temperature map. Once you see where the styles live, you stop following one recipe and start choosing coordinates.
Part of the same series as Cookie Lab: collect the whole distribution, expose the knobs.
A brief history
Flatbread with toppings is ancient, but pizza as we know it is Neapolitan street food from the 1700s–1800s — and the famous origin story (the Margherita, created in 1889 for Queen Margherita in the colors of the Italian flag) is, like the Toll House legend, at least half marketing. Naples codified the form: soft wheat dough, fierce heat, restraint with toppings.
Emigration did the rest. Neapolitan bakers brought pizza to New York (Lombardi's, 1905), where coal ovens, American flour, and aged mozzarella turned it into the foldable slice. From there it speciated by city: New Haven's charred apizza, Chicago's deep-dish (1943) and its thin tavern cut, Detroit's blue-steel pan pies (1946), St. Louis's Provel cracker, Long Island's grandma pie. Each style is a local answer to the same three knobs.
The modern era closed the loop: the VPN association formalized the Neapolitan spec in 1984, the home-pizza renaissance (baking steels, Ooni ovens, 72-hour cold ferments) put formerly professional parameters in home kitchens, and the internet filled with recipes spanning the entire space — from 00-flour purism to sweet-potato-crust Korean pies and mayo-corn Tokyo delivery. That whole span is what this dataset tries to capture.
The data
4,993 recipes scraped from 40+ sites. 939 of them specify a parsable dough — flour in weighable amounts plus a hydration between 40% and 120%. The rest are assembled pizzas (store-bought dough, “1 pizza base”) or recipes written only in volumes; they still count for styles, toppings, and dietary data, but sit out the dough math.
Recipes
4,993
With parsable dough
939
19% of dataset
Median hydration
68%
water ÷ flour, dough recipes
Median bake temp
500°F
home ovens dominate
Regional styles
Classified by parameters and title, not vibes — a recipe called “Neapolitan” that bakes at 450°F doesn't count. Most web recipes assert no regional identity at all, which is itself a finding: the median internet pizza is just “pizza.”
Topping profiles
The other axis of identity: what goes on top. Style tells you about the dough; flavor tells you about the pie.