Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Oh, the pangs of anticipation! I have an insert on order, discussed before, for my Weber BBQ. Charcoal and some wood to kick the heat up, a pizza stone that is supposed to get to the 700F and the Pizza Kettle insert that allows hot air to rise and travel over the top of the pizza then escaping from an opening in the front, cooking the pizza evenly, top and bottom.

Reviews from other sites have been mixed but overall pretty favorable. And mine is coming. Just got put on the slow boat across the Pacific. So I am 5 to 6 weeks from getting my hands on it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed the pizza stone will arrive in one piece. Time will tell. They are just too bulky and heavy to pay air shipping on.

I know others here have successfully made pizza on various BBQ grills, with and without stones. But like a kid on Christmas Eve, I'm envisioning my own little baby semi-psuedo-kinda-like-a wood fired pizza oven, spinning the pizza around to cook evenly, and finally pulling out a crispy, melty ode to the Hestia, goddess of the hearth.

Years back the container ships steamed at 24 knots an hour, but due to fuel costs, it has dropped to the 12 - 15 knots per hours range. Drat and double drat!

You realize that you went and made me (yes, it is your fault) buy one of these a couple of days ago? It's on its way, except it is on a truck instead of a boat. I think I'll probably pick it up on monday or tuesday (it is being sent to another city). I got inspired because I want to cook pizza without heating the kitchen plus spend more time outdoors. If it will do as well or better then the oven, I'll be happy.

Bully for you, Paul! I really look forward to hearing your experience with it, good - bad - or whatever. I've got Peter R's American Pie coming too, but it missed this ship by a day. So I'm haunting the web hunting wood fired hints for dough and so on. Lots of fun to be had playing with this in the future.

Color me about your delivery date!

It is not all that difficult to get a grill to bake pizza as well as an oven and to match the 10-12 minutes that it takes an oven to do the job. I suspect that mixed reviews for the Weber Insert come from owners who expect to match the 3-5 minute cooking times that are posted all over the web as optimum for pizza. It takes more than hot air to cook the top of a pizza in five minutes or less even if that air is 700ºF\375ºC. It takes some kind of radiant heat source either direct or reflected to do that and is the reason that pZealots experiment with things like clay, ceramic, or concrete liners for their kettle lids and building secondary fires on the cooking grids. The higher the temperatures get, the more difficult it is to balance the conductive bottom cooking and the convective and radiant top cooking to achieve a pizza that is evenly cooked and perfectly charred.

I will be watching for your reports before I yield to temptation. In the meantime, I think I will pursue the two stone method on my gas grill and see if that yields anything.

That sounds right to me, jim262. When at full temperature with a heated pizza stone, the Pizza Kettle reportedly turns out pizzas in the 8 minute range, not the 3 or 4 minute range full on brick ovens do. While I'm hesitant to modify my Weber here in the Philippines, I may look at putting some sort of grill/stone holder in the dome. I should, fingers crossed for luck, have two stones arriving. One is the 15 inch stone that comes with the Pizza Kettle, the second is a larger D shaped stone that more closely fits the 22.5 inch Weber's diameter with a straight cut along the back to allow hot air to rise.

If the stones arrive intact, and I can sort out how to do it without too much damage to my dome, I may try to suspend the smaller stone in the dome, creating a ceiling. Then heat both stones with the Weber in standard configuration. When the stones are hot, I could add the Pizza Kettle insert, though I'm not sure how I'd move the D shaped stone and food grill to rest in it when they are running 700 degrees. But if some sort of technique could be developed, I'd have hot stones above and below the pizza with the hot air running over it.

Lots of ideas, I just have to wait until I can get hands on with it. Patience is a virtue (write 100 times on the black board, Steve!)

Let the 'hot rocks' quips begin...

I am nearly certain that the perfect material for lining a Weber Kettle Lid to transform it into a perfect pizza oven would be NASA-surplus space shuttle heat shield tiles. They are aerodynamically and thermodynamically suited to the task without excessive weight. Since the shuttle fleet is retiring, maybe the tiles will show up g-bay soon.

Hmm, insulate the lid, and line it with something that will radiate back. Well, I guess you could insulate it outside, and let the lid radiate back. Just the insulation should increase the lid temperature considerably.

Well, with a little luck I'll get to use it this weekend. I need to pop across the border to pick it up, and hope to tomorrow (city is coming to install a "smart" water meter, uh-huh, somehow this will cost me more, not less). I'll post results and/or pics if I get to!

Steve, Paul,

This thread inspired me to modify our cast iron gas grill to support pizza making. I've already purchased the materials to insulate it a bit better, and just need to get some high-fire bricks to create the baking chamber. While the Weber Pizza insert is attractive, especially since the apartment has a couple of abandoned Webers, it's still charcoal grilling which is a pain. I just want to turn something on and have it heat up. I could modify a Weber to accomodate a gas jet, but that would require welding tools I don't have handy.

Jim,

But don't the tiles contain asbestos?