WalMart made it impossible to resist....

[demosthenes9]

They reduced the price to $79.99 for the Kettle Pizza Deluxe (with metal peel) (KPDU-22) to $79 and they had 8 in stock.   I kept watching Brickseek to see if the price would drop even further.  Went back to the store one day and found that they had wrapped them all up on a pallet with other stuff and moved them up to the rafters.  Luckily, one of the employees was nice enough to bring a pallet down and we got one with minimal effort.


Did a bunch of reading up both here and at Pizzamaking.   Will have to go back to see who to thank for which pieces of advice.  I picked up 3 14in pizza screens to use.   Went to a camp out over the weekend.  Picked up 8 packages of dough and 4 containers of sauce at Trader Joes to play around with.   just in case, I also had a print out of Bobby Flay's dough recipe, a baq of King Arthur bread flour and all other necessary ingredients.    For toppings, I'm strictly a meat guy, so I got 2 lbs of ground Italian sausage and cooked it up.   Also bought a package of small pepperonis and also got 1/2lb of larger sliced pepperoni from the deli.    Being a nice guy, I grabbed red, yellow, orange and red peppers for others, along with some mushrooms and a red onion.

The cook was done on an SSP that's now a dedicated camp cooker.   thanks to a couple of posts here, i removed the lid bail.    Must have missed teh posts here talking about the plastic piece on the vent tab.  Yeah, it melted. 

this was my first attempt ever at making my own pizzas.   Did read that use of a rolling pin was frowned upon, that I should work the dough by hand.  Tried that, failed miserably.  Ended up grabbing a full beer can and used that as a roller.

here are some pics that someone else took of the first pie coming out.  I was too busy being way in over my head for picture taking.



















I ended up making 3 pizzas on Friday, and people wanted some again on Saturday, so I made 4 more.   Lots of mistakes were made, to be sure, but everyone at the camp out loved the PK and many commented on how much they liked the pizza.   


All in all, it was a lot of fun and a good learning experience.   Thanks to you folks here at the WKC for getting me into this and for providing so much info and insight!

[Travis]

Those pizza's look pretty damn good from here. I bet that was fun


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[iCARRY]

I would sure like to help you eat them.


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[blieb]

Looks great!  My first time didn't go as smooth..

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[fljoemon]

Fantastic cook ... I hope to do this one day when we camp out with our near & dear friends. Thanks for posting this!

[MikeRocksTheRed]

Awesome!  It sounds like the pizza bug might have bit you!!!!!  I totally get being too over your head to take lots of good pics.  I only manage to get pics when I have a friend over who has been doing homemade pizzas for a long time, otherwise I am too busy.  It's always my goal to get all of the pizzas done as quickly as possible so people can see what the Kettle Pizza can really do.  That makes it tough to take a few seconds here and there to get pics.  Your crust looks pretty damn good.  I have a hard time hand stretching my dough and have yet to make a round pizza.  I'm interested to see how your rolled dough came out and what the consistency under the toppings was like.  It looks like you have 3 pizza pans which is good.  I've found that having all of the pizzas ready to go one after another makes it easy to bang them out while your fire is dialed in.

Keep up the great work....eventually you will get it really dialed in and will only slightly mess up a pizza from time to time.  If you are still looking for any tips feel free to ask.  Between a handful of us here we can get you straightened out.  Also check out the last 2 pages of this pizza forum.  That is where most of us had just gotten our KP's and all helped each other out getting things dialed in.

Looks like you are off to a great start!  I'm looking forward to watch the pizza-itis take over your life and pics of your future pizza cooks!

[demosthenes9]

thanks everyone!

Mike, the crust came out thin and a bit crispy, though not quite like a cracker.  If I had to guess, I'd say it was about 1/8th to 3/16th inches thick.    I took out a dough ball, sprinkled some flower and then flattened it as much as I could by just pressing down.  I then started working it by hand trying to to stretch it out.  At this point, it was maybe 8 inches across and still somewhat uniform in thickness.   That's when I grabbed the can and started rolling from the middle out to the edge.  With the roller can, it was easy to shape both by changing the rolling direction and by moving the pie around.   As the pie got larger, I'd grab the screen and hold it over top to check for size.  When the dough was the size of the screen, I placed it on there, laid on the sauce then pile on the toppings and the cheese. 

Thanks for the info about the first 2 pages.   I stumbled across that advice before I went camping and followed it to some degree.  That's where I learned about the screens, the metal top plate and how to build the fire.   Oh, wait, I forgot to mention the plate.    My cousin happened to have a nice sized scrap piece of 1/8" steel, so I took a 22" grate over to his workshop.   We placed the grate on top of the metal plate then lifted the flip up part.  We aligned the straight edge of the metal plate with the inner rod (I hope that makes sense).   We then traced the outer edge of the grate onto the plate.    I wanted to leave space for air flow, so we found the mid point of the plate (on the left to right axis) and marked it.   We then jimmy rigged a compass of sorts using a piece of string tied to a pencil.   We came in about 1.25 inches from the trace line, put the pencil there, drew the string taught placing the other end at the center point we had marked then ran the pencil along the line previously traced.   End result is a new circle about 20 inches in diameter.   Powered up a jig saw and had the metal cut in just a few minutes.   We then hit the edges with a file, then with a belt sander.

When I get a chance, I'll post some pics of it.      End result was that during the cooks, no matter what my temp was, the top of the pizza cooked at the same rate as the crust itself.  All I did was rotate the pies.       

[Vwbuggin64]

They are so beautiful I could cry lol

[MINIgrillin]

You went to a camp...and brought a SS? Outfitted with a KP? Rocking pizzas while other jokers are eating dogs? What a pimp!

[demosthenes9]

You went to a camp...and brought a SS? Outfitted with a KP? Rocking pizzas while other jokers are eating dogs? What a pimp!

Hahaha, that's kind of just how I roll.   We used to actually camp in tents down by the river at my Aunt's property.   I'd load up a Camp Chef 3 burner stove, my Gen 2 Perfomer, a JJ and a SJS for cooking and grilling.   As time passed, "Camping" evolved into all of us sleeping on cots in a 30 x 50 metal barn, but I'd still load all the grills/cookers for the weekend.    That SSP popped up locally on CL for $20 so I grabbed it and made my Aunt's barn it's permanent home.   Definitely worth the $20 to not have to pack and unpack my Performer each camp out.