How I Finally Got Eight Even Dough Balls (And Why It Changed My Whole Garden Pizza Night)

It was a Saturday afternoon last weekend, the kind that London occasionally serves up as if to apologise for everything. Proper sunshine, a cold beer sweating on the worktop, the back door flung open. I had eight mates coming over for a garden pizza session and I had been building up to this one for weeks. New baking steel finally seasoned properly, a batch of starter that had been singing all morning, and a vague plan to knock out a proper sourdough pizza evening without turning the kitchen into a disaster zone.

The problem, and there is always a problem, was that I have hosted pizza nights before and every single time I end up with portions that are all over the place. One person gets a thin, crispy wafer and the next gets something closer to a focaccia slab. Not ideal when you have got a queue of hungry people and a hot steel waiting. This time I was going to sort it out properly before anyone arrived.

The Snag I Keep Ignoring

Here is what I used to do: make a big batch of dough, dump it on the bench, and eyeball eight roughly equal pieces. Cut, look, adjust, cut again. Half the balls would be 220g and half would be somewhere around 270g, and I would tell myself it did not really matter. It matters. A lot.

A lighter ball stretches thinner and faster, goes a bit translucent at the edges, and by the time the person topping it has worked out what they want, there are holes forming. A heavier ball takes longer to stretch properly, holds heat differently on the steel, and you end up with uneven cooking across what should be a consistent batch. When you are running eight pizzas back to back on one steel with people hovering around the garden with plates, consistency is the whole game.

I had been meaning to use the Portioning Calculator for ages and this felt like the right moment to actually do it rather than faff around with scales and guesswork.

Putting the Numbers In

So the setup: I was working with a total dough weight of 1,920g. That is a 70% hydration dough using 900g of tipo 00, 200g of strong white, and my usual 2% salt, all leavened with 20% active starter. The dough had been through its folds during the morning and was sitting in the fridge from Thursday night, brought out about two hours before I started portioning. Summer kitchen, around 24°C, so the dough was already fairly relaxed and extensible.

I punched the numbers into the calculator: total dough weight 1,920g, eight portions needed. What it spat back immediately was a target weight of 240g per ball. Simple enough. But it also gave me a clear pre-cut weight confirmation, which meant I could weigh the whole mass first, confirm I was at 1,920g (I was actually at 1,908g, so I had lost a few grams somewhere along the way, probably surface drying), and then recalculate for eight portions of the actual weight rather than the theoretical weight. That gave me 238.5g per ball, which I rounded to 239g and cut accordingly.

Before I had been using the calculator, my variance was easily 40 to 50g across a batch. That does not sound dramatic until you see it baked side by side.

The Balling Itself

Once you have got the right weights, balling properly is where the texture later actually comes from. I worked each piece on an unfloured section of the bench, using a cupped hand to drag the dough towards me with enough friction to build surface tension without tearing. About ten to fifteen rotations each, resting seam-side down. Then into individual lightly oiled containers, sealed with cling film, and left to proof at room temperature for two and a half hours given the summer heat.

By the time people started arriving around six, the balls had opened up beautifully. Each one had a similar dome, similar jiggle when you nudged the container. That uniformity is not just aesthetically satisfying, it means you can time each pizza with confidence because the dough is behaving the same way each time.

The Pizza Night Itself

The steel was in the oven at 280°C for a solid hour before we started. I had set up a little outdoor station with toppings laid out in small bowls, a heavily floured peel, and a glass of something cold for morale. We ran the pizzas through one at a time, each one taking about five to six minutes on the steel, with a blast under the grill for the last ninety seconds to get some colour on the cheese.

Because the balls were uniform, every single pizza stretched to roughly the same diameter, about 28 to 30 centimetres, with a consistent cornicione that puffed and blistered evenly. Nobody got a thin cracker or a thick slab. A mate who usually ends up with the wonky one made a point of saying his was perfect, which felt genuinely good to hear.

There is something satisfying about a bake going exactly as planned, especially after years of these things going slightly sideways. The dough does the heavy lifting, obviously, but removing the guesswork from portioning meant the whole evening ran smoothly. No panicked re-rolling, no explaining why one pizza is noticeably smaller than the last one.

Worth Doing Every Time Now

I have been known to skip steps when I am in a hurry or when the kitchen is getting warm and the dough is starting to relax faster than I would like. Portioning felt like one of those steps I could always cut corners on. It is not. Especially for a batch bake where consistency across multiple pieces is the whole point, whether that is pizza, rolls, or any enriched dough where you want even baking times.

The Portioning Calculator takes about thirty seconds and it removed the one variable in this bake I had never bothered to control properly. That feels like a fair trade.

I have also started saving my formulas with Doughrise Pro so that when I do this again in a few weeks, the 1,908g batch at 70% hydration, eight balls, two and a half hour room temp proof is all logged with the result notes. No more trying to remember what I did last time by scrolling back through voice memos.

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