Pizza Lab
The spectrum of pizza
Almost every pizza style is defined by three knobs: how wet the dough is (hydration), how long it ferments, and how hot it bakes. Tradition puts numbers on those knobs. Neapolitan tradition says 60 to 65% hydration and 900°F for about 90 seconds; Detroit pushes hydration past 70% in an oiled steel pan; St. Louis drops under 50% and skips the yeast, which is why it is a cracker.
This page checks tradition against 5,130 web recipes. A style is assigned from the recipe title, the dough parameters, or the source's own label, and most recipes claim none. Only recipes with a parsable dough (weighable flour, hydration between 40 and 95%) feed the dough numbers, and a bake temperature counts only when the page states one; the scraper's placeholders are excluded. So: tradition says 55 to 70% and 900°F for Neapolitan; the 102 parsable Neapolitan doughs here sit at 64.4% median, and the 97 that state an oven temperature mostly bake at 500°F, because they are written for home ovens.
Part of the same series as the Chocolate Chip Cookie Lab: collect the whole distribution, expose the knobs.
Recipes
5,130
after dedupe and pizza-only filter
With parsable dough
1,480
29% of recipes
Stated bake temperature
2,778
median 428°F
Regional style identified
832
22 styles; 3,035 unidentified
Styles by the numbers
Medians per regional style. A style is listed here once it has at least 10 parsable doughs; below that the numbers are too few to trust and sit in the collapsed list. Dough columns come from parsable doughs only; bake columns from stated values only, with their own n.
| Style | Recipes | Doughs | Hydration | Salt | Oil | Sugar | Yeast | Bake temp | Bake time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Neapolitan | 207 | 102 | 64.4% | 2.4% | 0% | 0% | 0.30% | 500°F n=97 | 6.5 min n=108 |
| Pan Pizza | 123 | 64 | 63.0% | 2.0% | 7.5% | 0.6% | 1.50% | 450°F n=64 | 15 min n=89 |
| Roman al taglio | 59 | 50 | 78.0% | 2.0% | 3.0% | 0% | 0.60% | 482°F n=42 | 9 min n=21 |
| Thin Crust | 57 | 43 | 66.0% | 1.9% | 5.8% | 0.7% | 0.90% | 450°F n=27 | 9.5 min n=36 |
| Chicago Deep-Dish | 73 | 41 | 63.9% | 2.4% | 10.4% | 1.9% | 1.70% | 425°F n=39 | 22.5 min n=60 |
| Detroit | 55 | 37 | 72.9% | 2.4% | 0% | 0% | 0.90% | 513°F n=46 | 6 min n=48 |
| Sicilian | 48 | 31 | 67.0% | 2.3% | 6.7% | 0.7% | 1.00% | 480°F n=31 | 13.5 min n=31 |
| New York | 47 | 31 | 63.3% | 2.4% | 2.4% | 1.2% | 0.50% | 500°F n=25 | 8 min n=28 |
| New Haven | 29 | 16 | 61.1% | 2.4% | 1.5% | 0% | 0.80% | 500°F n=23 | 7.5 min n=19 |
| Chicago Tavern | 22 | 15 | 52.7% | 2.3% | 9.9% | 1.4% | 0.70% | 500°F n=16 | 9 min n=19 |
| Grandma | 19 | 15 | 74.4% | 2.7% | 6.4% | 0% | 0.90% | 500°F n=16 | 13.5 min n=17 |
| St. Louis | 20 | 13 | 55.9% | 1.8% | 9.4% | 2.7% | 0.50% | 450°F n=15 | 10 min n=18 |
Smaller samples (10 styles with fewer than 10 parsable doughs)
| Style | Recipes | Doughs | Hydration | Oil | Bake temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lahmacun | 8 | 5 | 70.3% | 9.2% | 450°F n=3 |
| Greek | 21 | 4 | 64.1% | 15.4% | 438°F n=10 |
| Roman tonda | 9 | 3 | 58.0% | 1.1% | 525°F n=5 |
| Argentine | 4 | 3 | 63.5% | 19.1% | 446°F n=3 |
| California | 11 | 2 | n/a | n/a | 450°F n=4 |
| Pide | 4 | 2 | n/a | n/a | 428°F n=3 |
| Pissaladière | 7 | 1 | n/a | n/a | 438°F n=4 |
| Khachapuri | 3 | 1 | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Farinata | 4 | 0 | n/a | n/a | 438°F n=4 |
| Coca | 2 | 0 | n/a | n/a | n/a |
Medians hidden below 3 values.
Where the styles sit
The same 12 styles as a picture. Home recipes compress the temperature axis: whatever the tradition says, most pages state 425 to 550°F because that is what a kitchen oven does. Hydration keeps more of the spread.
Hydration, parsable doughs
Bake temperature, stated only
Band = the middle half of recipes (25th to 75th percentile), dot = median. Hydration uses only recipes with a parsable dough; bake temperature uses only recipes whose page states one. Styles sorted driest to wettest.
Toppings
Topping profiles read from titles and the source's own tags. A recipe can carry more than one.
Formatsflatbread 322, grilled 151, calzone 147, mini 107, sourdough 86, gluten free 82, deep dish 75, stromboli 71, whole wheat 68, thin crust 61.
Diet
Every recipe's ingredient list was reviewed individually, one recipe at a time, rather than pattern-matched: the title counts for nothing, and a recipe is vegetarian or vegan only when nothing on its own list is an animal product. A recipe lands in “possibly” when a composite line such as “toppings of your choice” or a store-bought dough could not be resolved, which leaves 65 recipes possibly vegan on top of the 844 confirmed ones. Filter the list.
Adjacent to pizza
1,263 recipes are pizza-shaped but not a pizza dough: focaccia 397, flatbread 259, calzone 135, tortilla pizza 85, pita pizza 80, and so on. They stay out of the style table and the dough charts. Browse them.
A brief history
Flatbread with toppings is ancient, but pizza as we know it is Neapolitan street food from the 1700s and 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 (Provel: a processed blend of cheddar, Swiss and provolone that melts without stretching), Long Island's grandma pie. Each style is a local answer to the same three knobs.
The modern era closed the loop. The VPN (Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana) formalized the Neapolitan spec in 1984: 00 flour (the finest Italian milling grade, low in bran and ash), a puffy cornicione (the raised rim), wood fire, no oil in the dough. 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.
Sources
238 sources in all.