My first attempt at pizza on the grill went poorly last summer. It didn't take long to figure out why. I put the stone directly over the coals and by the time the toppings were melted, the bottom of the pie was completely charred. My wife took pictures while I scraped the char off and posted for her amusement on facebook. No one would eat the pie except me... whatever... I enjoyed the pie after working to remove most of the char.
So after finding you guys I've gotten excited to try to master this technique again with a little better preparation. So bear with me while I outline what I think the problems are as well as the solutions...
So charring bottom is about getting the hot coals out from directly under the stone... done. Got that lesson quickly.
The other is the heat wants to go up into the dome instead of sliding across the surface of the topping. But it's a little more complicated than that... a closed grill won't stay as hot as needed. So Kettle Pizza addressed that problem by offering up an opening in the front that allows for lots of air flow as well as pizza loading/unloading and also drives the hot air over the toppings. But the added height means more of the heat goes further up into the dome so you need higher overall heat to get effective temperatures at the top surface of the pie.
Concurrently, baking steel came to market with their product designed to improve on the pizza stone for cooking pizza in the home oven. Apparently the steel does a better job of transferring heat to the pizza crust than a pizza stone so the bottom can get the leopard spots everyone seems to love before the toppings get over cooked, plus has the benefit of durability (no cracked stones).
So the person at serious eats help connect the KP people with the Baking Steel people to make a better mouse trap and their collaboration results in the baking steel being used as an internal lid on the KP. They say the benefit of the steel is about radiating heat back down to the surface of the pie because the thick steel stores so much heat. I'm skeptical about this point... I'm inclined to believe the benefit is derived from redirecting the heat over the surface of the pie rather than into to the dome of the lid. I only say this because of my experience with my offset barrel smoker. Before modification, all the smoke and too much heat spilled from the fire box into the smoker barrel resulting in craze heat spikes. By installing a cookie sheet above the opening of the firebox into the smoker at a downward angle, the smoke passes easily into the smoker but most of the intense heat does not. Effectively by redirecting the air flow just a little, the temperature profile at the meat surface is changed dramatically
Plus I'm confused a little about the Baking Steel story... if the baking steel's ability to conduct heat is better and more uniform than a pizza stone in the home oven, wouldn't the same be true on the grill? But in the KP plus baking steel setup, they are still using a pizza stone.
So first, I'm wondering if anyone here has ever used the baking steel products as they were originally intended... to replace the pizza stone.. but on the grill. I heard one suggestion that because of the hotter temperatures achieved in the grill compared to the home over, that the steel would cause the bottom to burn compared to a pizza stone. Does anyone have any experience ?
Second, I saw the lid modification someone posted here where the opening for the pizza was cut directly into a lid. It seems to me that this might solve the problem of the pizza insert causing the dome to be higher and therefore losing effective heat at the surface of the toppings. It doesn't look as cool, bit it seems like the cool looking insert created another problem that is then solved by an over-engineered, excessively expensive 1/4" steel internal lid...
Third, someone posted here that prior to getting the baking steel insert for their KP, that they used other devices (pizza stone) on the top of the KP to redirect heat over the surface of the toppings and that seemed to work as well if not better than the baking steel insert. That makes me wonder if buying a 20 - 22" pizza stone and using it just like the baking steel wouldn't work every bit as well as the baking steel at half the price and weight.
But that brings me back to the mod shown where the guy simply cut an opening on an extra lid.
All my thoughts here are flawed in that they aren't driven by actual experience... except my inept first attempt resulting in charcoalized pizza crust.
Has anyone worked through these various approaches who can offer their real world experience?
I've read through a ton of posts here to see if these questions were already answered. If I missed and I'm asking redundant questions, I apologize in advance.