I’m not a pizza connoisseur or even a pizza fanatic but I do like good pizza, and by “good” I mean that which pleases me; what pleases you might be something entirely different. That’s not saying that I’m not fanatical about some things. Occasionally I go on quests to make the very best of something and that is all I focus on until I’m there or have given up long after ‘The law of diminishing returns” has applied. I once made meatballs once or twice a week for about three months looking for the perfect ball recipe.
Anyway, I wanted to make pizza but without a lot of labor, without a major financial investment, and I wanted to be able to do it on short notice so I started with trying to use the kitchen oven. With lots of help from the internet it wasn’t long before we got what we considered excellent pizza from the oven. The problem with getting the top and bottom done at the same time was easily mastered. Then summer came and nobody wants to heat up a kitchen cooking pizza so I turned my attention to my Weber Genesis Silver B grill, a straight forward 3-burner unit. I looked around the forums for methods and was surprised to see all sorts of attempts to use the lowly gasser as a pizza oven. They all required large investments of time for different reasons and I didn’t see what I considered great results so I decided to just move forward and experiment (I have eaten a lot of failed experiments, see meatballs above).
So this is where I’m at and I’m putting it here thinking it might give someone else a starting point in their search for a similar solution.
While my honey prepares the pizza I get the grill cranking. She uses an 18 oz. dough ball from the local grocery store and lays it out on a 14” Lodge cast iron pizza pan ($30 on amazon with free shipping) that has been covered with EVOO and corn meal. The pizza in the photos was green pepper, onion, and kalamata olives with pepperoni on one half. The pie goes onto the grill when I get a lid thermometer temperature of at least 550°. The lid is open the absolute minimum of time. It’s open, put in, and shut quickly. No peeking. I have my first look at 7 minutes. It will probably need a little more time. This one came off at just a little over 8 minutes. The pan needs to be cold for the top and bottom to finish together.
This works for us and I hope you can use it somehow. Thanks for looking.
Ready for the grill
Hot off the grill
