Pizza is one of the most delicious and popular dishes. Some people would or could eat a pizza every day – even if they know that this would probably not be entirely healthy. But how many calories does a homemade pizza actually have? In this article, we look into this question.

The calories of a pizza are made up of the dough and the toppings. Therefore, we look at both first separately and then together. Of course, the calories heavily depend on the toppings and their quantity. We’re going to show you the calorie count of a pizza based on the classic Pizza Margherita and a Pizza Salami.

Please note that average values are assumed in the following and values are rounded.

Calories per pizza dough

Let’s start with the dough. For the traditional pizza dough you need only four ingredients: Flour, water, yeast, salt. The latter three ingredients can be disregarded in terms of calories, thus only the flour remains. We have compared several flours and a Tipo 00 flour comes on average to about 350 calories per 100 gr. For a classic Neapolitan pizza we assume for most dough recipes on our blog a dough ball of 250 grams. Such a dough ball requires about 150 gr of flour; therefore a dough ball of 250 gr has approximately 525 calories.

Calories of a Pizza Margherita

A Pizza Margherita needs tomato sauce, mozzarella and basil. A few notes about the ingredients:

• Tomato sauce: we usually use peeled canned tomatoes for the sauce, which we season only with salt. 100 gr have about 30 calories.
• Mozzarella: When it comes to mozzarella, we like to use buffalo mozzarella instead of cow’s milk mozzarella because of the flavor. We have included both types in the comparison below. 100 grams of cow’s milk mozzarella have about 160 calories, 100 grams of buffalo mozzarella about 280 calories.
• Basil: In terms of calories basil can be neglected, as only a couple of leaves are used on a Pizza Margherita. For those who really want to know exactly: 100 gr basil have about 60 calories.

We prefer to top the Pizza Margherita moderately and not too heavy. From experience, we use the following ingredients and quantities for a Pizza Margherita:

Accordingly, a Pizza Margherita with cow’s milk mozzarella has approximately 605 calories, a Margherita with buffalo mozzarella amounts to ca. 660 calories. If you add additional ingredients, such as olive oil or grated cheese, this of course increases the calories further.

Calories of a Pizza Salami

How does it look like for the popular pizza salami? The calories vary depending on the type of salami, but on average 100 gr salami has about 350 calories. We further assume that a typical pizza salami is topped with about 70 gr of salami.

Therefore, a pizza salami has approximately 850 calories.

Conclusion

Based on the amount of calories, a pizza is certainly not the lightest and healthiest meal. But every now and then you can certainly treat yourself to a pizza – especially if it’s homemade! The advantages are that you know what’s in it and you can control the calories by choosing the toppings yourself. In addition, you can improve the digestibility of the pizza by a longer resting time of the dough!

Thanks for reading! I hope this article about the amount of calories in a pizza was valuable to you. If you have any unanswered questions, feel free to let me know in the comments. I’d appreciate it if you could share this content with your friends.

Julia