Cookaholics Bulletin Board

On another forum is a guy that did just what you said, took a propane burner from a kettle setup and installed it quite nicely in the bottom of a Weber. He used pizza stones both on the grill level and above in the dome (or top of the Pizza Kettle insert) to make a ceiling. He used aluminum foil to minimize air travel in to the upper part of the dome. He reports good results when making pizza.

After dropping a chunk of pennies on pizza stones, I found Axner's, a pottery supply outfit selling a 21 inch Cordierite stone (just about perfect for my dome) for 30 bucks. Cheap. Too late for me, maybe handy for someone else.

Steve,

Well, I set up my brick pizza grill today, taking about 4 hours of effort ... and then a cold front moved in. Right now it's 55F out, with 20mph gusts, and the grill won't climb above 400F. I have the oven heating ...

The wind is the culprit. Too bad you don't have a wind break of some sort.

So, received my KettlePizza. I've used it a whole one time, so this shouldn't be considered a review. My stone got broken in transit, but I chose to use it anyway; just pushed the parts together on the grate. I've not taken it up with them yet (today!).

I put one chimney of high quality briquettes in to pre-heat in their prescribed fashion (a "C"), and put the kettle on top with the lit vents 1/2 open. I put the stone in a little late, and started monitoring its temperature with an infrared thermometer. I became concerned the stone would not get up to temp before fuel started running low, so added another 1/2 chimney (unlit). I'm not sure this was necessary, plus next time I'll get the stone in earlier.

Once the oven was hovering around 450-500 or so, and the stone was good and warm, I put a chunk of cherry hardwood on the charcoal to kick up the temp. The temp rapidly exceeded 700, and I put the pizza in.



It was dark out, so not grate light, but you get the idea. It was definitely hotter in the back then the front, so I rotated the pizza after a couple of minutes. Now I am no great pizza maker at all, so it was somewhat misshapen, plus one edge was too thick ... well, you get the idea. Also I was using a diff dough recipe then before (CI thin crust pizza, but with AP flour instead of bread flour). So my excuses made, here is what we had after 4-5 minutes:



In a word: DELICIOUS. Really really good pizza. Not the best I've had, but better then anything local I've had save one place, which I would consider to be equal. I'm impressed. A little work on the crust and shaping, and it'll be bang on. I also did a second pizza (not shown, even more misshapen). On this one, the piece of cherry had essentially burned out and the temperature dropped to about 650 or 675. This resulted in a longer cooking time and the bottom being a little more charred then you might like, though still delicious. I should have put another piece of wood on, or raised the pizza into the dome for a minute to finish the top. I think the stone was still holding the high heat but the air wasn't up to the task. None the less, the second pizza was rapidly devoured.

I look forward to more experiments, but we just got a dump of late snow and next weekend (and week) I being sent to Hawaii, so it'll have to wait a few days, or possibly 2 weeks.

So, somewhat surprisingly, I got the improvised pizza oven to work desipite the weather conditions. It only got up to 525F, but considering, I have hopes of 650F when it's not a windstorm.

So, here's what I did.

We have a Char-Broil cast iron grill. If you want a gas grill, I highly recommend cast iron ones; like coals, they cook by radiant heat instead of direct flame. So first step was to line the grill with bricks and unglazed tiles in order to make the oven interior and block heat loss:



The idea was to form a pizza oven shape, where I could push the pizzas into a slot outside the grill, and not have to open and close the lid. Given the wind conditions, this didn't work; I had to move the bricks and close the lid all the way to get it to heat up. Next time.



I also had to cover the hinge in aluminum flashing to try to reduce heat loss out the hinge (this didn't work as well as I hoped):



The lovely thing about doing this on a full-size gas grill was that I could do two 12" pizzas at once. In less than 30 minutes, I had 6 pizzas:



Left-to-right: margarita, pesto/onion/olive/mozzarella, pecorino calabrese/rosemary/oregano.

Oh, and here's why I never want to use corn grits as pizza lubricant when cooking pizza indoors. All that black stuff is burnt corn grits:



Overall, a semi-successful experiment and I look forward to repeating it when the weather is more cooperative!

Oh, sorry! I didn't know you were looking. I'd have recommended pottery supply places; they do high-temperature round and decagonal stones in multiple sizes.

You guys ROCK! Love the photos and Paul, I'm glad to hear you feel it has promise. I expect my stone will be broken too given how far it has to come. But hopefully I will be able to piece it back together too. They say (they being some deeply committed pizza types) that adjusting the dough for higher temperature cooking is necessary. Higher hydration dough but it also depends on if you are after thin, crispy crusts or slightly thicker New York - Neapolitan style that's crispier on the edges but softer in the middle so you can fold it to eat. I'm so looking forward to playing with this!

Fuzzy, wow, nice man, really nice. Quite the setup and for control of your heat, gas is the way to go. The brick arrangement looks very workable. Corn meal is, I'm told, for lower temp ovens and to be avoided when you get seriously hot pizza stones. Being able to turn out pizzas in short order is a big plus.

I wasn't looking for a stone for the top until I started looking at other Weber pizza setups and some Frankenwebers. I bounced into the idea and the stone well after I had made my purchases.

Oh, no, you totally want the cornmeal for the peel. Especially when you only have a couple seconds to get the pizza off the peel, as you do with a pizza grill. And, when it's baked, the burnt cornmeal on the bottom of the crust is nice and crunchy.

I'll give it a try. I've been reading up on pizza peels. There are, amazingly, people that devote large amounts of time to sort the smallest minutia of pizza out. I used corn meal to "lube" my pizzas off the peel, which in my case is an upside down jelly roll pan. However we started using parchment paper and just sliding the pizza on that onto my homemade pizza stone. I continued to use cornmeal because I'm so used to it on the bottom of pizza, it seems like a "signature" of good pizza to me. I'm surprised to hear it still tastes good when blackened on a very hot pizza stone. Live and learn. And I do have a wooden peel coming with my Kettle Pizza kit.

Learning about peel design goes along with discussion forming pizzas on marble tops, less well accepted are granite and stainless. Apparently the smoother the surface, the more the dough wants to grab to it. Many guys complained about trying to get a pizza off a metal peel and into the oven. I think you've commented on that too. I read some guides on making your own wooden pizza peels and they say do NOT sand very smooth or finish with a sealer other than mineral oil or similar. If you go to a very fine finish, the pizza dough grabs, while coarser surfaces seem to release better. It depends on the type of crust you want to produce, thin crispy, New York/Neapolitan, the light airy California style, or thicker medium crusts.

Higher hydration doughs present their own problems, but many of the pizza gurus recommend high hydration dough for very hot oven that produce temperatures similar to those of a wood oven. I think the super peel is the answer to those, but I'm not going to drop the pennies.

I used corn meal as well and it was very blackened, but tasty. Totally with Fuzzy on that one. For this most recent experiment, I used an Aluminum peel and had no trouble getting the pizza off of it. Normally I use a wooden one, but the aluminum one had a longer handle...