Breadsticks — made with pizza dough
Soft, garlicky, pull-apart breadsticks are pizza dough at its most generous: roll the same dough into ropes, bake, and drown them in garlic butter. The pizzeria sells them as a side; they're really just the dough showing off.
Pick how many you want and the page weighs the dough to the gram — the calculator's engine. The garlic butter is non-negotiable.
How much dough
For 12 breadsticks, on New York dough — 40 g of dough a breadstick:
| Ingredient | Baker's % | For 12 breadsticks |
|---|---|---|
| Flour | 100% | 283 g |
| Water | 63% | 178 g |
| Salt | 2.5% | 7.1 g |
| Olive oil | 2.5% | 7.1 g |
| Sugar | 1.5% | 4.2 g |
| Yeast | 0.23% | 0.6 g |
Making more or fewer? The dough scales straight off the count:
| Breadsticks | Total dough | Flour |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | 240 g | 141 g |
| 12 | 480 g | 283 g |
| 18 | 720 g | 424 g |
| 24 | 960 g | 566 g |
The yeast is weighed for an example 8 h rise at 21 °C — set your real schedule in the calculator and it reweighs the pinch.
What else you’ll need
Beyond the dough — for 12 breadsticks:
- 40 g butter, melted (or olive oil)
- 2 garlic cloves, finely grated
- 20 g Parmigiano Reggiano, grated
- a little chopped parsley or dried oregano
- flaky salt, to finish
How it’s done
- Make the dough: 12 × 40 g pieces of New York dough — 283 g flour, 178 g water, 7.1 g salt and the yeast, weighed by the calculator for your schedule. (Leftover pizza dough works too.)
- Cut the dough into 40 g pieces and roll each into a rope about 20 cm long.
- Space the ropes on a lined tray, cover, and prove 30 minutes, until puffy.
- Bake at 220 °C / 430 °F for 12–15 minutes, until golden.
- Brush the hot sticks with garlic butter and scatter with Parmigiano, parsley and flaky salt.
Questions from the counter
How are these different from garlic knots?
Same dough, same garlic butter — the breadstick is a straight rope, the knot is tied. If you'd rather tie than roll, the garlic knots recipe is right next door.
Soft or crisp?
Thicker ropes and the bake above give soft, pull-apart sticks. For crisp grissini, roll them thinner and longer and bake a few minutes more, skipping the prove.
Can I make cheesy dunkers?
Scatter low-moisture mozzarella over the sticks for the last few minutes of the bake, then cut between them — instant cheesy breadsticks for the marinara.
Get the dough
The New York preset weighs the batch and writes the schedule — mix, rise, shape, bake. Breadsticks is what you do with it.
The clock is a suggestion. The dough is the boss. In bocca al lupo!
Impasto is a free pizza dough calculator for Neapolitan, New York, Roman, Sicilian, Detroit, thin crust and focaccia doughs — flour, water, salt and yeast weighed in baker's percentages, with the fermentation schedule written for you.