Can the Weber Summit Charcoal do good pizza? Sure it can. Friday night is now officially pizza night for the family. Here are some results from the WSC at about 550° F. It took 4 minutes on the pizza steel for the tuna and cheese (yeah, I know, not my choice of topping), and maybe 6 minutes for the tomato and chorizo. I didn't use the diffuser above the coals for this pizza cook or the previous one, though I have done in the past and I may again in future.
I'm still working out the best way to get the WSC up to temperature. Currently I leave the lower vent about halfway between the smoke and the grill settings, and the top one about half open. My impression that if I left them fully open, it would allow too much heat through and out, without allowing it to build up within the cooker, but maybe I'm overthinking this? Maybe I should just blast it with vents fully open top and bottom, then close down when the briquettes are red and glowing?
Incidentally, I used only recycled briquettes for this cook, with no apparent problems. That is, these were briquettes that were not completely consumed in previous fires, from which I had just shaken off the outer shell of ash.
The crust is a very simple bread machine recipe, made with 00 flour and just a tiny bit of yeast. The tomato sauce is simply good quality diced tomatoes and some salt, given a bit of whizz with a stick blender to get rid of the larger chunks. So yes, they are raw when they go on the pie, which I thought might not work, but they were cooked by the time they came off the WSC.
The resulting pizza was very crispy - when you held a slice it did not sag or droop but stayed solidly horizontal - and well browned underneath. The tomato pie had a couple of very dark patches, although even those were still perfectly edible. Maybe 6 minutes for that pizza was slightly too long. Still, it all was much enjoyed. Now it's just a question of experimenting with different toppings.
RC
I'm still working out the best way to get the WSC up to temperature. Currently I leave the lower vent about halfway between the smoke and the grill settings, and the top one about half open. My impression that if I left them fully open, it would allow too much heat through and out, without allowing it to build up within the cooker, but maybe I'm overthinking this? Maybe I should just blast it with vents fully open top and bottom, then close down when the briquettes are red and glowing?
Incidentally, I used only recycled briquettes for this cook, with no apparent problems. That is, these were briquettes that were not completely consumed in previous fires, from which I had just shaken off the outer shell of ash.
The crust is a very simple bread machine recipe, made with 00 flour and just a tiny bit of yeast. The tomato sauce is simply good quality diced tomatoes and some salt, given a bit of whizz with a stick blender to get rid of the larger chunks. So yes, they are raw when they go on the pie, which I thought might not work, but they were cooked by the time they came off the WSC.
The resulting pizza was very crispy - when you held a slice it did not sag or droop but stayed solidly horizontal - and well browned underneath. The tomato pie had a couple of very dark patches, although even those were still perfectly edible. Maybe 6 minutes for that pizza was slightly too long. Still, it all was much enjoyed. Now it's just a question of experimenting with different toppings.
RC
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