Dough Products
Wholemeal Pizza Dough
A part-wholemeal pizza dough with real flavour: half strong wholemeal and half 00 or white bread flour, a little wetter than usual, rested before kneading and risen slowly in the fridge. Nutty, crisp and still light, for 4 pizzas in a home oven or pizza oven.
- Serves 4
- Makes 4 balls of 225 g for 25–28 cm pizzas
- Prep 30 min plus 30 min rest, rise 18–48 h
- Bake 7–9 min (home oven) or 90 sec–2 min (pizza oven)
- Italian
Method
Weigh the two flours into a large bowl. In a jug, stir the salt into the cold water until it dissolves, then stir in the yeast (crumble fresh yeast in with your fingers), the olive oil and the honey, if using.
Pour the liquid into the flour and mix with one hand or a wooden spoon until there is no dry flour left. The dough will look wet and sticky. Cover and leave for 30 minutes. This rest matters more with wholemeal than with white flour: the bran needs time to soak up the water, and the dough becomes noticeably firmer and smoother.
Tip the dough onto a clean, unfloured worktop and knead for 8–10 minutes, using a dough scraper to gather it up, until smooth and stretchy. Wholemeal dough never becomes as silky as white dough, and it will stay slightly tacky; wet your hands rather than adding flour. (Stand mixer: 6–8 minutes on low with the dough hook.)
Put the dough back in the bowl, cover and leave at room temperature for 1 hour.
Divide into 4 pieces of about 225 g (8 oz) and shape each into a tight, smooth ball (fold the edges into the middle, turn it seam-side down and roll it under your cupped hand). Put them in a lidded box or on a floured tray, well apart, or in 4 lightly oiled tubs. Cover tightly and refrigerate for 18–48 hours. Wholemeal flour ferments faster than white, so do not leave it longer than 2 days.
Take the dough out of the fridge 2–3 hours before baking and leave it, covered, at room temperature until soft and puffy. Heat the oven with a pizza stone or steel inside, on a shelf near the top, at its highest setting (250–290°C / 480–550°F / gas 9) for 45–60 minutes, or light your pizza oven.
Dust the worktop generously with semolina or flour. Turn a ball over in the flour, then press it out from the centre with your fingertips, leaving a 1–2 cm (½–¾ in) rim. Lift it over your knuckles and stretch it gently, turning it, to about 25–28 cm (10–11 in). Wholemeal dough is less stretchy and tears more easily than white, so take it slowly, and if it springs back, leave it for 5 minutes before trying again. Do not use a rolling pin.
Slide the base onto a peel or upturned baking tray dusted with semolina, top it lightly and slide it onto the hot stone or steel. Home oven: bake for 7–9 minutes on a stone or 5–7 minutes on a steel, until puffed and browned; finish under a hot grill for 1 minute if you like. Pizza oven: let it settle to about 400°C (750°F), a little cooler than for white dough, as wholemeal browns and burns faster, and bake for 90 seconds to 2 minutes, turning often.
Tip: tap a step to tick it off as you cook.
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Useful kit
- Pizza stone: Cordierite stone for a home oven or barbecue: stores heat for a crisp base. Heat it for 45–60 minutes.
Unicook rectangular pizza stone, 38 × 30.5 cm, cordierite (Amazon.co.uk)
Old Stone round pizza stone, 16 in (Amazon.com) - Pizza steel: Faster and crisper than a stone in a home oven; heavy, and lasts for ever.
Chef Pomodoro pizza steel, 35.6 × 30.5 cm, 6 mm (Amazon.co.uk)
Baking Steel Original, 14 × 16 in (Amazon.com) - Launching peel: A thin aluminium peel to slide the pizza in and out. Perforated peels shed excess flour.
LKE aluminium pizza peel with folding wooden handle (Amazon.co.uk)
Ooni 14 in perforated pizza peel (Amazon.com) - Digital scales: Weigh flour, water, salt and yeast to the gram: the single best way to make better dough.
Salter Arc digital kitchen scale, 3 kg (Amazon.co.uk)
OXO Good Grips 11 lb digital food scale (Amazon.com) - Dough scraper: For kneading sticky dough, dividing it and lifting dough balls without tearing them.
Vicloon 3-piece dough scraper set (Amazon.co.uk)
OXO Good Grips multi-purpose scraper (Amazon.com)
More kit, and how to use it, in our pizza guide.
Our picks, checked on 1 November 2026. As an Amazon Associate Cookeryonline earns from qualifying purchases.
See also
How this recipe was developed
We compared well-tested wholemeal and whole wheat pizza doughs from the UK, the US and Italy. Most agree that part-wholemeal makes the best pizza, that wholemeal dough needs more water and a rest before kneading, and that a slow cold rise improves the flavour.
- Flour: half wholemeal. America’s Test Kitchen uses 60% whole wheat with bread flour; Fratelli ai Fornelli’s half-wholemeal pizza 50:50; Doves Farm and BBC Good Food’s 100% wholemeal pizzas are smaller and denser (our all-wholemeal note).
- Water: 75%. Between Doves Farm’s 70% and America’s Test Kitchen’s (about 76%); BBC Good Food’s all-wholemeal base is 80%.
- A rest before kneading. King Arthur Baking’s whole wheat crust rests for 30 minutes to let the bran soften; we do the same.
- Cold rise, 18–48 hours. America’s Test Kitchen refrigerates its whole wheat dough for 18 hours to 2 days; King Arthur overnight. Shorter than our white dough because wholemeal ferments faster.
- Oil and honey. America’s Test Kitchen uses olive oil; King Arthur uses honey (and orange juice) to soften the bran’s bitterness. We use a little of both, the honey optional.
Sources we compared (ratings as shown on each site on 1 November 2026):
- America’s Test Kitchen: Whole-Wheat Pizza Dough
- King Arthur Baking (PJ Hamel): Whole Wheat Pizza Crust (4.5/5 from 32 ratings)
- Fratelli ai Fornelli: Half wholemeal pizza dough
- Doves Farm: Wholemeal Christmas tree pizza (wholemeal dough)
- BBC Good Food (Good Food team): BBQ chicken pizza (wholemeal base)
- Serious Eats (J. Kenji López-Alt): The Pizza Lab: How Long Should I Let My Dough Cold Ferment?
- Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN): International Regulations (Disciplinare) 2024
This is an original Cookeryonline recipe written in our own words. Ingredient choices and techniques are credited above; no source text has been copied.
Chef’s notes
- Why half and half? The bran and germ in wholemeal flour cut through the gluten strands, so an all-wholemeal dough rises less, tears more easily and bakes up denser. Half wholemeal and half white flour (close to the proportions used by America’s Test Kitchen and the Italian site Fratelli ai Fornelli) keeps the nutty flavour and extra fibre with a crust that still puffs and blisters.
- More water. Wholemeal flour absorbs much more water than white, so this dough is 75% water against 67% for our white Pizza Dough. It looks too wet at first; the 30-minute rest (step 2) fixes it. King Arthur Baking uses the same trick for its whole wheat crust.
- Wholemeal or whole wheat? They are the same thing: UK wholemeal flour is called whole wheat flour in the US. American white whole wheat flour, milled from a paler variety of wheat, is milder in flavour and works well here too.
- All wholemeal: use 500 g (1 lb 2 oz) strong wholemeal flour and 400 ml (1⅔ cups) water, rest it for 45 minutes before kneading and bake as above. The pizzas will be smaller, denser and more bready, but very tasty.
- Freezing: as for our white Pizza Dough. Freeze the balls after shaping, use within a month, and thaw overnight in the fridge.
- Toppings that suit wholemeal: earthy, robust flavours. Try mushrooms with garlic and thyme, roast squash with sage and goat’s cheese, broccoli with chilli and anchovy, or a Margherita made with buffalo mozzarella.