The Best Tips for Cooking Pizza on the Ceramic Grill
In this blog, I provide ten tips for making the best pizza on the ceramic grill.
One of the most popular benefits of ceramic Kamado grills or stainless steel Kamado grills is versatility. Heat retention and insulation make Kamados excellent in a variety of cooking methods – from slow and low smoke, to quick and quick grilling, to roasting, stewing and roasting. These grills do it all.
Grilling pizza on the grill works well because these grills can reach such high temperatures, replicating the flavors you get from your favorite wood-fired pizza restaurant.
Maybe you’ve tried how to bake pizza on a gas grill. A gas grill makes great pizza, but making Kamado Joe pizza or pizza on Big Green Egg or our kamado grill has an edge over other grills.
Pizzas cooked on a regular grill are heated and cooked primarily from the bottom. Kamado baked pizza takes advantage of the circular dome shape of the insulated lid.
Essentially, your pizza will cook from the top and bottom.
The heat from the hardwood block charcoal is red hot and needs to be diffused to bake or grill pizza.
Kamado grills usually come with a heat deflector designed to remove heat and allow for a more even temperature when cooking indirectly. This is the key to not only grilling pizza, but all baking on the grill.
Essentially, it’s hacking the cooker to make it function more like an oven than a grill.
The heat deflector is designed so that you can still use the grate of the grill to cook food. Most people will place a pizza stone or pizza pan directly on the grate of the grill.
However, adding a height is the real benefit of the pizza cooking setup. For this reason, it is important to place the pizza stone or cooking surface as high as possible on the dome.
By placing three firebricks on the grate of your grill and placing the baking stone on top, you accomplish two things:
The pizza rises further inside the grill. This allows the heat from the top of the dome to reflect off, which will melt the cheese and help cook the topping.
Firebricks add more thermal mass to the grill. Once hot soaked, hot bricks allow Kamado grills to recover faster when you turn on the grill.
There are no rules for baking pizza. But there are some guidelines to make your pizza tastier.
Ten Tips for Making Kamado Pizza
1.Start with a clean Kamado grill
The secret to getting steady and high heat is good airflow. Remove all ashes from cookware.
Make sure your baking stone and heat deflector are clean and free of any food residue from previous cooks. Leftover leftovers can leave a spicy smoky smell on your food.
2.Use Fresh Charcoal
Hardwood lump charcoal is the preferred fuel source for Kamado grills. Fresh charcoal burns cleaner and hotter than charcoal exposed to moisture and humidity.
3. Preheat Your Kamado Grill
It is important to allow your grill, heat guide and pizza stone enough time to reach temperature. Kamado grills take time to reach temperature.
Once the grill is stable and hot, it will stay at your desired temperature for quite a while. We recommend allowing a full 90 minutes between lighting the charcoal and cooking your first pizza.
Close the lid: and keep it closed! You’ve worked really hard to get the grill to the temperature you want for pizza cooking, so don’t leave the dome open for too long.
Know your dough: Buying store-bought dough or pizza dough from your local pizzeria is a good option. But ready-to-use dough is made for cooking at a specific temperature.
If your dough has instructions on letting it warm to room temperature, or at what temperature to cook it, follow them. If the instructions for the dough say to cook at 400°F, it will likely burn at 700°F. This is because it may contain sugars that burn before you get a light brown or crispy crust.
There are also plenty of pizza dough recipes online, and making your own is fun too!
Win by being thin: Pizzas cook quickly—most are done in under 20 minutes. Make sure to thinly slice meats, vegetables, and other toppings before cooking so they cook evenly on the grill.
Don’t overload your pizza: Making homemade pizza is so much fun because you have a blank canvas to season. However, when the pizza has too many toppings, the toppings are steamed instead of baked, leaving a soggy crust. That’s not what you’re after.
Make it a family affair: You can’t have a party without people. Encourage your guests to customize Kamado pizza to their own taste. Some of the most random toppings our guests put on their pizza are the most delicious.
Embrace the season: Seasonal toppings are great because they’re fresh and often plentiful. Basil, peppers and tomatoes often come to mind – but consider a less popular option on pizza.
Fruits like cherries, mangoes, and peaches go well with spicy and savory meats. Squash blossoms, thinly sliced sweet potatoes, and spicier peppers like shishito or hatch peppers are all wonderful toppings. Even the often abundant zucchini can be delicious on Kamado pizza.
Have fun and experiment: While favorites like sausage and pepperoni with mozzarella and red sauce always make for a delicious pie, get creative. Dressings like ranch or Italian salad make a delicious dressing.
Pickled vegetables like artichoke hearts, pickled asparagus, and jalapenos are delicious on pie. We even made dessert pizza on the Kamado grill. Consider a s’mores pizza or use chocolate chip cookie dough for the crust with a layer of fresh wild bilberries and mascarpone cheese.
Another great thing about cooking pizza on a Kamado grill is that it’s done outdoors. So if you’re enjoying pizza on a hot summer day, you don’t need to fire up the oven and heat up the house.