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Kristine invited a few of her friends over and we pre-decided on grilling pizzas. Dough from scratch and toppings mostly from scratch as well.

I learned that the best way to keep the grates and the interior of the grill box clean is to use a pre-cooking burnoff. You turn the burners all the way up and let it burn for 10-15min. The elevated temperatures will turn the drippings from last time into ash, both on the deflectors (flavorizer bars in Weber speak) and the grates. Then you can use your steel brush and brush away the ash. For stubborn stuff, it’s recommended to dip it in water before scrubbing to get some steam clean action.

Back to the pies: I placed the 14″? stone directly on the grates and let the whole thing preheat to an indicated 500°F, basically as high as it would go. The pizzas were made with a basic flour, sugar, and instant yeast recipe that rested for a few hours. We ended up making 12 pizzas total, including 2 dessert ones and 2 to-go orders. They were approximately 8-9″ in diameter. Thin crust. One thing that helped a lot was using cornmeal on the peel to keep the dough from sticking. Another thing is to occassionally brush burnt cabonized leftovers off of the pizza stone. Otherwise you get some unwanted burnt bits on the bottom of the crust. Each pie took about 5 min, depending on how many toppings were on it. They turned out well. Grilling the pizzas outdoors also keeps the A/C bill down during the hot summer months where you don’t want to run an oven at full blast for 2 hours. Pictures to come soon.