Detroit-style pizza is defined by its pan, so the one number that decides how it comes out is how much dough goes into that pan. Almost nobody states it. Recipes give you a dough weight and a pan size separately, and leave you to work out whether yours is thick or thin.
I took 10 data points from 8 published sources, converted everything to grams of dough per square centimetre of pan, and put them side by side. The spread is about 38% from the thinnest to the thickest.
Ten recipes, one number
Pan areas used throughout: 8 x 10 inch is 516 cm², 10 x 14 inch is 903 cm². Where a recipe gave no total dough weight I added the ingredients up, and those rows are marked derived rather than stated.
| Source | Pan | Dough | Basis | g/cm² |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Charlie Anderson | 8 x 10 in | 235 g | stated | 0.455 |
| Charlie Anderson | 10 x 14 in | 411 g | stated | 0.455 |
| Feeling Foodish (classic default) | 8 x 10 in | 236 g | derived from coefficient | 0.457 |
| Feeling Foodish (classic default) | 10 x 14 in | 413 g | derived from coefficient | 0.457 |
| Detroit Style Pizza Co. | 8 x 10 in | 283 g | stated | 0.549 |
| Alexandra’s Kitchen (yeast) | 10 x 14 in | 536 g | stated | 0.593 |
| Alexandra’s Kitchen (sourdough) | 10 x 14 in | 546 g | stated | 0.605 |
| PizzaLogic | 10 x 14 in | 546 g | stated | 0.605 |
| A Cozy Kitchen | 9 x 13 in | 473 g | derived | 0.627 |
| Detroit Style Pizza Co. | 10 x 14 in | 567 g | stated | 0.628 |
The numbers
Range 0.455 to 0.628 g/cm². Median 0.566 g/cm². The mean sits at 0.553. Narrowing to only the 10 x 14 inch pans, which is the classic format, the median rises to 0.593.
The most interesting thing in the table is a convergence. Charlie Anderson gives full figures for two different pan sizes, and both work out to 2.94 grams per square inch. Feeling Foodish’s dough calculator uses 2.95 g per square inch as its stated default for a classic Detroit. One recipe author and one calculator, built separately, landing on the same coefficient to two decimal places.
Only one source treats it as a variable at all
Of the eight sources, exactly one, Feeling Foodish, names dough weight per unit of pan area as something you would deliberately tune, and offers a thin, classic and thick coefficient to pick from. Everybody else gives a single weight for a single pan and says nothing about what it would mean to change it.
That is a real gap. If you own a pan that is not one of the two standard sizes, most of these recipes give you nothing to scale with.
What is not settled
Nobody in this set tested thin against thick and reported which people preferred. “Thicker is more authentic” is well evidenced. “Thicker is better” is tested nowhere here.
The single best source for this question was a specialist pizza forum thread on exactly this variable, and it refused an automated read, so it is not in the data. Serious Eats is not in it either. Two of these ten rows are derived by adding ingredients up rather than taken from a stated total, and one source’s own page has an internal inconsistency between its per-pan weights and its stated yield, which I resolved in favour of the per-pan figures.
What I did with it
My own pizza dough calculator had a Detroit preset of 380 g in a 35 x 25 cm tin, which is 0.434 g/cm². That is below every actual recipe in the table. It is now 495 g, which puts it on the median of the ten. The old figure was flattered by a bug: the calculator was treating a rectangular tin as a circle, and the wrong arithmetic made a thin number look normal.
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