Pizza party planner — dough & shopping list
Feeding a crowd is arithmetic wearing an apron. Pick your pizzas and your headcount, and this planner weighs the whole evening: the dough in batches (one per style, straight from the calculator’s engine) and a single shopping list with every topping from all 21 classic pies merged and summed.
No other pizza calculator we know of does the toppings. Ours can because every classic pizza recipe on this site is already weighed per pizza — the planner just multiplies and merges.
The party
one Neapolitan each — about 260 g of dough each
8 pizzas (4 vegetarian) · 2320 g of dough · feeds about 8 — 8 covered
The dough, batch by batch
New York — 4 balls of 320 g
4 × Pepperoni
Yeast depends on your schedule — open this batch in the New York calculator (4 pizzas pre-filled) and it times the dose for your hours.
Neapolitan — 4 balls of 260 g
4 × Margherita
Yeast depends on your schedule — open this batch in the Neapolitan calculator (4 pizzas pre-filled) and it times the dose for your hours.
The oven, planned
Start the oven about 60 minutes before the first bake. Pans go first and hold happily under a towel while the heat climbs to 450 °C for the rounds — give the steel 3 minutes back between launches (already counted above). All in: ≈ 54 minutes of baking. The oven guide has the full preheat story.
The shopping list
From the pantry: 1384 g flour · 36 g salt · 19 g olive oil · 11 g sugar — plus the yeast your schedule decides.
How it counts
The planner thinks in grams of dough per person — the one number that survives contact with a buffet. A normal appetite is anchored to the model: one 260 g Neapolitan ball each, the calculator’s own default. The other two are honest nudges either side:
| Appetite | Dough / person | When |
|---|---|---|
| Light | 180 g | kids, late slices |
| Normal | 260 g | one Neapolitan each |
| Hearty | 340 g | nobody had lunch |
Worked example: ten people at a normal appetite want 2600 g of dough — that’s 10 Neapolitan balls, or 5 Detroit pans, or any mix the planner adds up for you. Pizzas vary in size (260 g a Neapolitan ball, 630 g a Detroit pan), which is why the planner counts dough, not pies.
Why the shopping list is exact
Every classic pizza page on this site weighs its toppings per pizza, scaled from the same registry the planner reads — so the margherita here is gram-identical to the margherita recipe. The planner multiplies each pie by its count, merges shared ingredients across the whole order (the mozzarella on four different pies becomes one line), and rounds to kitchen amounts once, at the end — never per pizza, so the rounding error doesn’t multiply with your guest list.
Counted things stay counted: you can’t buy 4.7 basil leaves, so leaves, cloves and anchovy fillets aggregate as whole pieces with the gram total alongside.
Questions from the host
How many pizzas do I need for 10 people?
At a normal appetite, 2600 g of dough — about 10 Neapolitan-sized pizzas, fewer if some are bigger styles. Set your real headcount and appetite above and the planner does this for any number.
Can I mix styles in one party?
Yes — that’s why the dough comes out in batches, one per style, each with its own hydration and salt. The planner’s oven card sequences your exact order — pans first (they hold beautifully while resting), then the rounds back-to-back on the saturated steel — the oven guide has the preheat math behind it.
Can I make the dough ahead?
Please do — party dough is better dough. A day or two in the fridge improves every style (the cold ferment guide), and for real lead time you can ball and freeze weeks early, then thaw the night before — the freezing guide is the make-ahead manual.
Which pizzas are vegetarian?
The planner badges them — 9 of the 21 classics carry no meat or fish, judged from the same topping registry the recipe pages weigh from, and your order’s tally shows next to the pizza count. One honest footnote: some traditional cheeses (Parmigiano, Gorgonzola) are made with animal rennet, so strict vegetarians should check their labels.
Where's the yeast in the dough batches?
Waiting on your schedule. Flour, water and salt scale with the pizzas, but the yeast dose depends on when you make the dough and how warm it sits — pick your style in the calculator and it times the dose to your party hour.
Then make the dough
The planner sizes the party; the calculator schedules it. Take each batch to its style preset, set your hours, and the yeast, timeline and method come out written for your evening.
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.