Revisiting Pizza on the Big Green Egg (May 25, 2009)

For the record, I wanted to add a few small modifications to what I've written about pizza on the Big Green Egg.  When I first started these, I thought the pizzas on the BGE were pretty good, but didn't really measure up to what I've had from a wood-fired pizza oven.  I've learned a few things, though, and can sincerely say that when the stars align I can produce something as good as any pizza I've ever had from a wood-fired oven.



So, a few notes:

1. Smaller pizza stone:  Earlier, I recommended a larger (16") pizza stone like the American Metalcraft PS1575, despite warnings by none other than the guru of the ceramic cooker, the Naked Whiz, that the larger stone may result in scorching your gasket.  Indeed, my gasket is long gone and not really missed, even for low-and-slow cooking.  Nevertheless, after breaking my fire brick stone in an adventure I'll explain later, I went for the 14" stone from BGE, which I believe contributed to my being able to get a higher temperature more easily.
2. Raise your grid; skip the plate setter:  You need to get your pizza stone up to the level of the opening of your BGE.  Most of my early efforts were done with the BGE plate setter.  I recently switched to using a raised grid, without the plate setter, and this had two very beneficial results.  First, there was a clearer path to the dome, and with the heat's upward path impeded, you seem to get a hotter temp more quickly.  Second, with little or nothing between your stone and the first, the stone seems to get hotter.  Without an IR thermometer, I couldn't swear to it, but the difference in the crust was obvious from the first time I did it.
3. Give your dough some time:  I've refined my dough recipe and wrote about that earlier.  The proportions have turned out to be dead-on, but one thing I've added to that process after having read it in a number of places is letting the dough proof for 14 hours or more.  Yeah, I know, sounds like a complicator, but it's actually a simplifier.  Get everything set up to divide the dough (the first 30 minutes of so worth of work), split it into two plastic containers and pop them into the fridge overnight.  When you're a couple of hours away from cooking, take them out and transfer them to covered bowls.  They'll get to room temperature and rise a bit more, and will also have even more elasticity.

Here are a couple of pizzas that illustrate what I'm writing about here.  The first (at the top of this post) is a standard pizza margherita.  Note the slight bit of char on the crust, which was very tasty.  The dough sprang up and got that wonderful loft within a minute or two of going onto the stone.  The total cooking time was four and a half minutes, and though it could have possibly gone a shorter amount of time, everyone agreed that it was soft, neither dry nor underdone, and tasted wonderful.   The second, here, was a mixture of some locally cured red pepper bacon (Tracklements) with buffalo mozzarella, topped with some fresh local arugala.  You can also see, here in the cut-away, the nice job the crust did, also in 4.5 minutes.  The temperature inside the dome of the BGE was about 600 degrees.

I mentioned earlier breaking my fire brick pizza stone.  I thought I might experiment with trying to simulate the wood-burning oven by keeping the top on and propping open the lid of the BGE with fire-proof ceramic wedges.  This was a disaster.  The pizza blackened on the bottom, the heat seemed out of control and irregular, and even the pizza stone--even though it was fire brick--cracked down the middle.