Pizza dough schedule and session planner

Choose when the first pizza should be ready and how you will ferment the dough. PizzaHQ works backwards to when to mix, ball, refrigerate and take the dough out — and, if you like, the rest of the evening: prep, preheat and every bake slot. Each step is a window, because real dough does not keep appointments.

When should the first pizza be ready?

Style (optional)

Fermentation approach

Plan the whole session, not just the dough

What you will bake on or in

Pizzas

Fit in the oven at once

Your schedule

Choose when you want to eat.

How this works

The schedule is anchored on the moment the first pizza goes into the oven, set so that it is ready at the time you chose. Each earlier step is placed by subtracting stage durations: the longest durations give the earliest time a step can sensibly happen, the shortest give the latest.

Dough stages use the durations PizzaHQ's fermentation schedule has always used — about 2 hours of bulk for a same-day dough; 4–6 hours of bulk and 4–8 hours in balls for a long room-temperature dough; about 2 hours of bulk, 24–72 hours in the fridge and 2–3 hours of tempering for a cold-fermented dough.

Preheat comes from the equipment profile's own setup text. Bake time comes from the style's recorded bake, or the equipment's typical bake. Recovery between batches is PizzaHQ's estimate from the equipment's recorded recovery speed.

Formulas

Batches: pizzas ÷ pizzas that fit at once, rounded up
Baking window: (batches − 1) × (bake time + recovery) + bake time
A step's window: earliest = first bake − (sum of longest durations after it) latest = first bake − (sum of shortest durations after it)

Assumptions

Preheat figures are recorded for 11 pieces of equipment; anything else gets a clearly labelled placeholder.
Recovery estimates run from 0–1 minutes for very fast equipment to 10–15 for very slow — PizzaHQ's estimates, not measurements.
Yeast is a range from PizzaHQ's fermentation model, which interpolates between documented reference points; the cold schedule is modelled at about 48 hours and 4 °C.

Limitations

Room temperature moves everything: a warm kitchen shortens bulk and tempering, a cold one lengthens them. Watch the dough, not the clock.
Preferment, sourdough and enriched doughs are scheduled as the closest of the three approaches, with a note when that applies.