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Awesome pizza at home


GRoston

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All,

 

This is the first time I have done something cooking related that was worthy of being posted here!

 

We have been making pizza at home for a while. Until today, every time we have cooked pizza, it was on a baking dish in the oven. Even though we used the freshest of ingredients (like tomatoes, herbs, onions, etc., from our garden), the crust was never 'perfect'.

 

To address this issue, we set out to acquire a piece of granite, such as those used for kitchen counter tops, approximately 16" x 24". Yesterday, in Toledo, we found a granite shop that had a 16" x 25" piece just lying in a 'scrap' heap and they sold it to us for $10. We then splurged and got an IR thermometer from Harbor Freight (on sale for $35) and a 14" pizza pan from Meijer for $5.

 

After cleaning the granite, I put it in my outdoor grill, a BBQ Galore Grand Turbo, a gas fired grill that claims to produce 60,000 BTU of heat. I then fired up the grill, and preheated it until the granite reached 650 F. With some cornmeal in the pizza pan, the pizza easily slid out of the pan onto the granite and with the lid closed, the pizza (about 12" diameter and very thin crust) cooked in under three minutes.

 

And wow! was it good. The curst was as good as any I have ever had.

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Sounds good!!

 

I use my grill all the time!!  Here is one thing to consider.   You can usually get a nice crust,  but not always is the top of the pie  cooked correctly.  I have found  trying to get the plate closer to the top dome really helped me out.. ie  maybee lift it with some fire brick.  But if this is not an issue for you...   then  forget it  :)

 

Cheers and happy cooking

Its good to have Morels

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What Paul said.  I think you'd benefit from some more infrared heat from above.

 

Our friend scott123 is a very accomplished pizza chef, full of good advice.  I encourage you to read up on his posts, both here and on other fora.

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That's a cool setup. I wonder how it would do with a steel plate on the bottom as well as the top. The higher conductivity might give as much heat transfer as a stone that's 100-200° hotter.

 

Sadly I gave up on trying to make awesome pizza at home. Never had access to anything but a home oven, and in the middle of my efforts a couple of the best pizza shops in NYC opened up within walking distance. 

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Notes from the underbelly

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