It’s been a busy few months on the Pizza & Bread Dough Calculator, so I wanted to share a progress update for anyone following along.

Here’s what’s changed since April.

The big one: build your own recipe

The headline feature of this stretch is a full Recipe Builder. Until now you were limited to the calculators I’d built in – poolish, biga, sourdough, etc. Now you can define your own:

  • Add any ingredients you want, expressed as baker’s percentages (flour is 100%, everything else is a percentage of the flour weight)
  • Write your own step-by-step instructions, which turn into a checklist on the recipe page, with a live preview while you build
  • Share it: every recipe can be turned into a URL or a QR code, with the recipe data encoded right in the link. Nothing gets uploaded to a server; you can hand a link to a friend and it just works
  • Save and back up: your recipes live in your browser’s local storage, and you can export everything to a JSON file as a backup or to move to another device

This was the biggest ask from people using the site, and it’s now live.

Sourdough got some love

The sourdough pizza calculator was refined with a proper salt percentage input and clearer process descriptions, so it’s easier to follow start to finish.

A generic sourdough bread calculator

Alongside the pizza-specific tools, there’s now a standalone sourdough bread calculator. Enter your total dough weight, starter amount, salt percentage and target hydration, and it works backwards to give you the flour and water amounts.

Everyday usability fixes

A lot of the work this period was quietly making the site easier to actually use in a kitchen:

  • Dark mode, following your system preference with a manual toggle
  • Sessions are remembered — no more screenshotting your numbers. Every input, checkbox, and even the date picker restores itself when you come back to a calculator, with a one-click reset back to defaults
  • Recipes are now calculated either by total dough weight or by flour amount, whichever is easier for you
  • Mobile spacing, typography and button placement cleanups, including moving reset/print controls up near the page title where they’re easier to reach with one hand
  • The confusing split between old and new poolish recipes was merged into a single, clearer page

Behind the scenes

  • Upgraded to jQuery 4.0 and standardized all pages onto a shared includes file, which makes the codebase easier for me to maintain (and easier for anyone who wants to contribute). Considering getting rid of jQuery all together.
  • Added a GitHub Discussions link in the nav, so questions and ideas are visible to everyone instead of getting lost in my inbox
  • A “What’s New” box now sits at the top of the site, so you don’t have to come find posts like this one to know what changed

Try it out

The live site is at calculators.ramin.io, and the project is open source on GitHub — bug reports and feature ideas are always welcome on the Discussions tab.