Smoked Pizza - Successful failure...

I'm an avid fan of having people work on my house and cooking dinner for them, its cheap and I like cooking! So I had my dad and father in law working around my house for 4 days starting around the 4th. We decided to finally try using the Big Green Egg to make a pizza since I had picked up the pizza stone on sale.

First, what I learned. Do not, under any circumstances use a Papa Murphy's pizza for this. The crust is too thin and you can't get it off the paper tray without considerable effort. By the time we did get it transferred to a pizza pan the pizza was misshapen, we didn't attempt to move it from the pan to the stone. A frozen pizza would have been better than what I attempted.



Secondly, if you are going to use a pizza stone on the grill make sure it is quality. The BGE sells the one I have, its ceramic just like the egg and can withstand the heat. I've read nothing but horror stories of the ones sold in stores like Williams-Sonoma cracking when the egg gets hot, and yes it does get hot.  The stone will retain heat even though the dome temp doesn't get as hot.

So onto the set up. The BGE turns into a wood burning oven when you add in the plate setter. So that's what I did, I turned my plate setter legs up, allows more air between the pizza and the plate setter, then added the normal grate on top of the plate setter legs. After lighting the grill and getting it to around 200 degrees I added the pizza stone and let all of it heat up to about 450 degrees.

Since I used a Papa Murphy's pizza (fail!) I cooked it following the directions that came with it. After about 12 minutes the pizza was done.

The crust was crispy. It had a nice smokey flavor, but to me it tasted like someone used a smoked cheese instead of regular cheese. Everyone else seemed to like it, I thought it was okay but I wasn't impressed and I blame it 100% on the pizza choice.

All in all I will try this again, I'm thinking the "build your own pizza" area at Meijer will be getting a visit from me soon. If I can ever get something I like I will probably try making my own dough, although I hated working with dough when I worked at Bearno's so maybe not.