I am not usually blown away or impressed with things once I have them in my house, many times the hunt for the perfect item is more fulfilling than actually buying the thing and bringing it home. This was not the case with the pizza stone. A couple weeks ago Wife and Boy both mentioned I should invest in a pizza oven for the backyard and it got me thinking, why can't the grill do that? It provides heat and the pizza would cook just as well. After going back and forth for a bit, I looked online and another oven/grill would eat into the space we have in the backyard patio plus it would be another thing to maintain. I then was looking at Youtube videos on the matter and noticed some people use their grill and just add in a "pizza stone". I was intrigued, looked into how much they cost and figured that we could try this for the reasonable price of $30-$40 bucks. I tried thinking about the pizzas we eat and usually they are the large or extra large, but I couldn't really find stones bigger than 12x15. There are bigger ones but they go all of a sudden from under $50 to over $150. I figured this would just be more of an experiment, so I ordered a set that comes with the cool little paddle used to carry the pizza on and off the oven, and the one I ordered even had the big pizza cutter that rocks back and forth from end to end.
We actually received it last weekend but I never really got excited to open it because I started reading about cleaning it and using vinegar and all this little ticky tacky crap. This weekend I decided I would just wipe it and the heat would kill anything on it, 400 degrees is pretty hot. For Friday night, I bought some cheap technically flatbread pizzas at Walmart, I don't ever shop at Walmart, but they have had some of my doomsday stuff, so I am becoming more open minded about them. I figured the pizzas were cheap and if they didn't work out, it wouldn't be a big loss. Originally I was thinking of making my own dough and all that stuff. Wife convinced me not to kill myself and just try it on some Papa Murphy's pizzas that are already prepared. I thought this would be an even cheaper option. We did talk about going out to eat, we were going to go to Carraba's Italian Restaurant, but the traffic congestion just sucks the energy out of me. Baby A was also rundown from the Thursday night game, so we stayed in. We made some spaghetti with shrimp inside, incase the pizzas didn't work out and then I grilled the pizzas. I will admit it requires a learning curve. The instructions said cook 13-15 minutes at 350. The grill was at 400, and when I went to check on it about 8 minutes in, the bottom was completely charred and burned to the stone. I used the Blackstone metal spatulas, which work perfectly for this, and scraped them off, without damaging the pizza. I still found the pizza to be great, even burned like it was. Baby A complained, but ate as much as I did. I burned the other two pizzas less and less and even Wife enjoyed them to the point of suggesting we do it again on Saturday.
I went got a couple of round pizzas Saturday morning, along with some more of the flatbread pizzas, this time from HEB. I am still "burning" the bottoms too much, maybe I need to bring the temperature down, but about 4-5 minutes is working pretty good. With the thicker pizzas I then put them on the top rack to give them more time for the cheese and stuff to melt and really heat up without burning the bread completely. As good as these have been, I can only imagine they will get better with better quality pizzas, which I will be buying next time we do this. I totally recommend buying one of these stones. By stone, they mean a ceramic plate about a quarter inch thick. I am sure a big brick or other thing that will absorb heat like that would work, but it places that heat right into the bread and does something different that the oven just doesn't do.
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