Cookaholics Bulletin Board

I lit one [weber] chimney till it was well lit, but not ashed over. I put it in the back of the BBQ. I put another 1/2 chimney of unlit on top of that. I placed the unit, with grate, stone and lid over it immediately. I left the bottom vents completely open, and the top vents about 1/2 open. I left it for quite some time, likely 40-60 minutes. There were margaritas involved, so exact time wasn't measured. The stone temp at that point was very close to 600F according to my infrared measuring thingie. The temp meter on the unit was pegged (well over 700).

Lump will likely burn hotter, but the thermal mass of the stone does require some time for heating, so the slower burn *might* be better. Might. Hard call. Of course, you could also try it sans stone (the pizza pan), it might actually work pretty well. The pizza stone may be overrated, especially in extreme heat. But I think it'll need closer monitoring, nothing to moderate the heat.

Cool! Or hot! Nice mix, margaritas and pizza!

I will try different mixtures of the available charcoal here. Reading your guide I will probably do the chimney lit with a mix of lump and briquette, put food grate and stone on, then cover them with the dome lid (sans Pizza Kettle). I'll let that heat up for 15 minutes or so then check the stone's temp with my IR thingy. I'll add more lump charcoal and the wood, which we are still hunting, put the Pizza Kettle on the grate and add the lid back. I'll watch the temps from there with a pizza waiting to go. When it hits the 600F or plus area with the stone we'll be at it.

The Pizza Kettle folks say that any longer meats need to be pre-cooked since the fast cook will not adequately finish them if they are put on raw. So I'll be doing the pizza sausage sous vide ahead of time. Of course, I need to make the pizza sausage so I'm way behind the curve on this. Or in the weeds as we used to say.

I'd say one thing: Don't over engineer or plan. Much like smoking, it seems to go magically better every time you do it. Somehow, you just nail it better. Or like making a vinergarette or pan sauce for that matter. Just wing it and then make more pizza IMO, grilled pizza outdoors is great pizza no matter what!

I'd also be curious if you made a very 'local' pizza, with local fruits and veg which were amiable to minimal/fast cook.

Well, the local end of it is the tomatoes which we turn into a sauce. The little plums are good and I'm going to try roasting some, but the bro-n-law skinned them already. Dunno if you can roast skinned tomatoes?

Cheese is Australian, no cheese being made here, or very very little. Though my PH meter is in the next package due to arrive, so that may change in a month or two.

I am looking at doing some sort of potato pizza with local potatoes and with Camote aka Sweet Potatoes. Spam, the mystery meat variety, is way popular here, so not local but loved by locals, so a Spam pizza is on the drawing board.

Being the quintessential gadget guy, over thinking affects me much like gravity, I may be aware of it but I cannot escape it! None the less, your advice is most apt and welcome. I will try, as best I may, to proceed at a slow pace and do a couple of variations. But I'm fighting the urge to be able to flash some pron of my iteration of a "re-invented" wheel on a couple of BBQ & Pizza forums. I went through this with the smokenator and simply had to sit down during a couple of six hour smokes with a book and keep my eye on it until I started to comprehend. I'm still learning to be sure.

The pizza peel, a wooden affair, of smallish size, works quite well. I burnished it with flour, a trick one of the pizza-heads told me about and that seemed to improve it's friction coefficient. Or lessen it. Whatever, the pizza slipped off quite nicely!

We are in the middle of a rain storm that has a westerly wind which is wetting down my BBQ area. So it is all theoretical at this point. My wife cannot stand the wait so we are making pizza in the oven at I write this. Using the KA Beer Dough recipe and CI's fast sauce. Toppings will be mozz, fresh tomato sauce, and fresh basil. Maybe a bit of the Hormel pepperoni if I can find my last stash of it.

Only briefly; otherwise they come apart into a paste. Unless that's what you want.



Both sweet potatoes and spam are high-moisture, which will be a problem on a thin-crust pizza. You'll want to cook them first in some way which takes away most of their water.

Okay, Serious Eats is in my brain stealing ideas! Joke Lang, as they say in the Philippines. But they redid their test of the Pizza Kettle with exactly the setup I have in mind. I'm just missing the second grate to make it work. Anyway, they did it and it works like a charm. They revised their evaluation of the Pizza Kettle and say it is the best pizza they have produced.

So Y-E-A-H B-A-B-Y! That's the way we do it! Unhuh unhuh!

Here is the review with aluminum foil & second stone hack. I was talking about loading charcoal on the top of the second grate, so not totally exactly as I imagined, but within a decimal point or so. Serious Eats Pizza Kettle Hack