Does the dough not have instructions? Assuming it does, then just make it into appropriately sized doughballs (~3-4") for personal sized pizzas.
Then for sauce, you can go one of two ways- the more classic sauce of cooked tomatoes with oregano and olive oil, or a more simple one of tomatoes and salt. It works surprisingly well, especially with high quality canned tomatoes like San Marzano.
At that point, you just shape your dough, ladle on as much sauce as you want, put cheese on, and put toppings on. Like @Beckdawrek points out, don’t overdo it. Less is often more on home pizzas.
Cooking is more art than science; in our oven with a pizza steel, about 5 minutes in a preheated oven at 550 works pretty well.
Raising the dough as one big ball compared to raising it as multiple smaller balls does affect the final product. Whether it’s important to any particular eater of pizza is a separate question.
His particular wants. There comes a time, when you’re cooking for yourself and you realize “hey, my kitchen, my oven, my ingredients. I’ll have it the way I want it, personally”
Kinda why they are called personal pan pizzas. Ya think?
Ah but those are for home made dough, which again is a closely related search but not the same thing. For whatever reason Google’s AI seems to think everyone who is using premade dough wants a big pizza and everyone who makes their own dough wants personal pizzas. What it won’t give you is a personal pizza recipe from pre-made dough (I could infer of course, by working out total weight of dough in the recipe and calculating from there, but I’d rather not)
But that requires maths! Also the recipes for big pizzas don’t say the size of the pizza they make so they are missing a piece of the equation required to work that out ( how many pieces do I need to divide 1 pound of dough to make 6-8 inch pizzas?)
And I also need to know whether it’s best to divide before rising or after
I really don’t see why there is a difference that is so important. Just skip the steps of how to make the dough and go from there. It’s really not that hard.
I can infer how to make my pizzas from that recipe. But that would mean adding up the weight of the ingredients and working out from that how much I need to divide each 1 pound lump of pre-made dough into. But I’d rather not.
But fundamentally it’s just an example how Google sucks now. Not to long ago I could have put the “pre-made” or something similar in quotes in google and it would actually have found just that exact term. That’s no longer possible, it will try and be clever and infer what it thinks you mean. That makes it much less useful for specific queries.
Regarding buying pre-made pizza dough, when I was a child decades ago, I don’t think it was sold in this fashion in the supermarkets so a few times my mother would buy a ball of dough (sized for a standard large pizza) from a local pizzeria for a couple of dollars. I have no idea if your local pizza place will sell you just the dough or how much they would ask but it’s an option.
I cook by sight, feel and taste. Not for some chefs idea of what I might like.
It’s a very small step. Get the basic idea from a recipe and doll it up or down by what you like.
Google is a guide, a crutch and often very wrong.
YMMV but I know what I like and what I can eat. And that’s how it is.
You may make a mistake and cheese flows allover the pizza pan or you burn the bottom. Maybe have one side not quite straight or there’s a lump in the middle. It’s really ok. Next time you’ll do better.
While I agree 100% that you shouldn’t feel obligated to follow a recipe, I think the second and third are a bit unfair.
I thank my parents that from a pretty young age they taught me to cook (in part because I was a picky eater), but a lot of people [ perhaps especially younger people ] just haven’t had the experience to be comfortable experimenting or deviating, until they’ve built up a long history of tinkering. And some are just flat out risk adverse - if it’s okay why try something different?
For these people, Google, while far from perfect, is a step in the right direction. Some people can’t pick up steps from reading a cookbook (if they own one), but getting explicit, step by step directions with images and/or video is going to work a heck of a lot better.
FTR, I have no idea if our OP @griffin1977 is in this category, so not putting words in their mouth, just my personal feelings.
Anecdote time - when my now-wife, then-girlfriend and I were getting more serious, it turned out that outside of desserts, I was the better cook. She had pretty simple tastes (since expanded) and was perfectly happy eating the same thing 3-4 days in a row. She didn’t see the need, and so while she knew a lot of basics, she didn’t do much experimentation, just followed the recipe.
Years late, she and another friend and I were watching the then-new Food Network for Iron Chef (OG) and Good Eats, and it made both of them a LOT more interested in experimenting around a theme, customizing dishes, and making something new based on things they’d liked in the past.
And boy, did I pick up a lot of techniques and pairings from the same shows.
To this day, I’m still making and trying out new dishes that I’ve found online, or from a youtube channel (Shout out to Tasting History with Max Miller!)
Sometimes you use a crutch because you have a broken leg and have a real need for help.
So actually that’s generally how I cook. But I’ve never cooked personal pizzas before (and probably only cooked pizza from dough maybe once or twice in my life? Never in the last 10 years.). So I’d prefer a recipe for the basics (“put this amount of stuff together, then cook it at this temperature for that number of minutes”). Once I’ve done that I’ll play it by ear.
I think a lot of the problem here in determining a step-by-step how-to guide for you is, how do you like your pizzas?
For a pound of dough, I’d consider that to be 4 servings of personal sized pizzas. Start there. Just divide the dough into 4 pieces and see how it goes. If, like me, you prefer a thin crust, you may find that a pound of dough is better divided into 6 portions – or maybe even 8.
I use a rolling pin to get my dough as thin as I like it, then slide the completed pizza onto a stone preheated in a 500F oven, baked for 6-7 minutes. Use less sauce and cheese than you want to, and go easy on the toppings the first time. The first pizza will guide you for all future efforts.
If you prefer a thicker crust, then stick with the quarter pound of dough and don’t toss or roll it thin. You’ll still end up with a 6-8" pizza, just a heartier crust. Probably add 2-3 minutes to the baking time.
If you use a peel, make sure to use a liberal amount of flour beneath the crust so it will easily slide onto the stone. I always sprinkle cornmeal on the stone just before I slide the pizza onto it, too.
I make my own pizza dough, but I think your concerns about getting portions right are translatable, as has already been expressed by others in this thread. In general, pizza is very forgiving food. You roll it thicker or thinner, as you prefer, dress it up as you like and bake it until it’s done.
Given this, I’m going to repeat some very wise advice from upthread:
I buy my doughs from TJ (2-3 times a year say), and they’re cold enough to have very little give. So let them get to room temps or you’ll be struggling with rubber-banding a lot.
IMHO, it’s going to rise a bit during the thermal change, which is fine, so after it gets to temp, cut into 4 (or more) equal pieces, reshape into balls, and let it rest for another 30 minutes or so, then roll or stretched to desired thinness and add toppings and sauce from there.
Now, I don’t like marinara, so mine are more flatbreads, but from my wife’s experience (the pizza lover!) it’s better to go lighter on sauce for smaller pizzas especially. YMMV of course.
I would like to make pizza, but my pizza stone has glitter on it. There’s probably no point in trying to google how to clean glitter off of a pizza stone.