Fornata: Pizza Dough Timer

Fornata works out your pizza dough and walks you through it, from the flour to the hot oven.

Answer three questions: which pizza, when you want to eat and how many. You get a shopping list in grams and a plan with the exact time of every step. You don’t need baker’s percentages or any jargon for that.

Eight styles, each with its own dough and technique:

Neapolitan: a soft, thin centre and a rim full of bubbles.
Airy: bigger bubbles and a higher rim.
Canotto: a biga dough with a huge, almost hollow rim.
Sourdough: no baker’s yeast, a light tang.
Roman thin: rolled out with a pin, crisp as a cracker.
Roman in a tray: big holes and a crisp base.
New York: big, thin, folded in half.
Detroit: rectangular, with a fried cheese crust at the edges.

The Detroit goes into a pan, the thin Roman is rolled out with a pin, the Neapolitan is stretched by hand. The app tells you at the step where it matters.

The plan works back from your dinner time. Wherever the dough allows, hands-on steps stay out of the night, and if the time you picked cannot be met, the app says so plainly.

A step reads like this: “Pour 397 g of water at 22 °C into the bowl. Dissolve 17.9 g of salt. Add roughly a tenth of the flour (64 g), then 0.85 g of yeast.” Heating the oven is a step of its own, with a reminder, because it is the one people forget. The baking advice depends on your oven: an electric, wood-fired or outdoor gas pizza oven, a home oven with a steel or a stone, or a pan and grill.

Cooking mode puts one step on the screen at a time: the grams in large type, small actions to tick off as you go, kitchen timers for kneading and resting, and undo if you tap too soon.

Once you start, the app keeps the time for you: what to do now, how long is left, what comes next. The countdown of the current stage shows on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island, and reminders arrive even when the app is closed. If your kitchen is warmer than planned, enter the actual temperature and the forecast is recalculated: ready at 21:06, 17 minutes early.

The yeast is not a guess. The dose follows from the fermentation plan and your kitchen temperature, through a model calibrated against real baking. Fresh, instant dry or active dry: choose the yeast you have and the grams are worked out for it. The water temperature is matched to how you mix, by hand, with a stand mixer, a spiral mixer or a bread machine, because a machine warms the dough.

The handbook explains why dough behaves the way it does: flour and its W strength, water, salt, yeast, fermentation, mixing, shaping, baking, a table of faults with their fixes, and a glossary of Italian terms.

Also inside: a history of your batches with ratings and one-tap repeat, a detailed mode with baker’s percentages and flour strength, °C or °F, and light and dark themes. Everything works offline. Your batches and settings can be mirrored to your own iCloud so they follow you to another iPhone; they never reach us.

Fornata is available in 14 lang