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Originally Posted by Fire Me Boy!
I totally forgot about this exchange. Search for "kettlepizza" and found this. I just bought one, expecting it next week! Got the steel top, too!
I have a full sized baking steel in the oven. Think it would be overkill to use that instead of the tombstone?
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Congrats.
The only problem I've run into is that I have a hard time getting the dome temp up quite as high as I'd like without making the bottom too hot. I think the answer would be just a shitload of lump charcoal around the edges making sure that there's no direct heat on the stone but rather high enough convection above it that it eventually heats on its own. You need real lump charcoal for the BTUs but it burns so fast that it takes a lot of tendering. Maybe just fill that back basket with a shitload of good quality lump as a compromise. Trying to get underneath it while it cooks is just so damn hard that I always use briquettes down there b/c of the long cook time.
What I've done recently is cheat a little bit. I'll launch my pizza, rotate it for a bit to get the leopard spotting, then I'll grab my metal 'retrieval' peel, pull the pizza and set my grill scraper underneath it; one of these cheap, shitty things (I'm pretty sure an in-law got me that thing at some point):
There's no real surface area in contact with the stone or the peel at that point so you have no more conductive heat from the bottom passing through the peel. It's all just radiant/convection heat. And when the peel has been out of the grill, it's cool enough to by a lot of time.
By raising the top of the pizza near the top of the baking steel that has all that heat trapped in it due to thermal mass, it essentially acts as a broiler that browns/crisps anything on top that hasn't gotten where you want it without burning the bottom. You can rest the handle of the scraper and peel on the lip of the kettle pizza and it keeps everything nice and level. If you try it, you'll see what I mean.
It's a work around for when you don't have your oven dialed in exactly right but it's a pretty bulletproof method.