Kamado Joe | Pizza 101

hey guys I'm John Setzler welcome back to on a video that I've been wanting to do long time and I'm just going to call this the pizza video we're not going to talk about specific recipes or anything but what I want to do is spend a little bit of time showing you how to cook pizzas properly on your Kamado Joad one of the great things about the Komodo Jo is its ability to cook pizzas and when I surf off the internet you know looking at social media I see a lot of people cooking pizzas and I also notice that pizza cooks are one of the higher percentage failures that I see where people have difficulty so what I want to do in this video is I'm going to spend some time showing you how to do this and the various methods that you can use for the various types of Pete to keep you from ever having a failure I'm going to show you how to set up your grill I'm going to show you some extra items that you might want to have on hand for doing pizza and then we're going to look at several different types of pizza we're going to start with a what I call taking baked pizza that you buy at the grocery store how to cook that on your comodo Joe I'm going to teach you how to cook a pizza from scratch where you have purchased the dough from the grocery store and I'm going to show you how to cook a pizza from scratch where you made the dough yourself there's a little different technique involved in all of these so after you've seen this video you should have no problems and I'm going to show you a lot of things here so this video is going to run a little longer than some so let's get started okay the first thing I want to do is I want to show you how to set your grill up when you're going to cook pizza you typically want to start out with a fairly full firebox because we're going to build a very hot fire we're going to be cooking at temperatures that start at 500 degrees in the dome so what we're going to do you're going to set your divide-and-conquer flexible cooking rack in place and you're going to set either your accessory rack or your grill grates in the top position and this is a perfect opportunity for you to clean your grates you don't have to do anything you can put these on here and when you're done with the peach that they're going to come off and they're going to be burned clean so the next thing we want to do is either on the accessory rack or on the grill is you want to set both halves of your heat deflector at this level we're going to keep these up high that way the heat is able to come out and come around this and not be held down low in the firebox the next thing we need to do is create some space between our heat deflectors and we're going to put our pizza stone on here as well but we want to air gap between those and for my testing purposes I have come up with spacers you need to create an inch and a quarter to an inch and a half of space between your pizza stone at this level and your heat deflector and I found these these are black iron pipe plugs that I found at the hardware store they were about a dollar and a quarter apiece maybe and these are this particular ones designed for the one-inch pipe so when you stand this on in and it gives you exactly an inch and a quarter of space and when you set your pizza stone on top of that you've got a nice air gap and what this air gap does is it keeps the pizza stone from overheating whenever you have an inch and a quarter to an inch and a half air gap between the deflectors in the stone your pizza stone temperature is going to be approximately the same as your dome temperature and that makes things a lot easier here because if you don't use this and if you just set your pizza stone here on the grill the pizza stone will get hot but it will continue to get hotter it will get ultimately a lot harder than your dome temperature and that's what's causing scorched pizza crust so the other thing that you can do that I don't recommend is setting the pizza stone directly on top we I used to like this technique the problem with it is is this does keep the pizza stone from getting too hot but if you're cooking multiple pizzas Stone will continue to get hotter and hotter as you go and two pizzas in or three pizzas in you may be scorching your stones so like I said find something that's fireproof that will give you one and a quarter to one and a half inch of gap between these two and this is how we're going to set up for all of our pizza cooks it doesn't matter what kind of pizza were cooking this is going to be the setup so the first thing I want to do to begin this process is start with the taking baked pizza so what I will do is I will light up the grill and I will bring the temperature in the dome up to somewhere between 500 and 550 degrees okay I've decided to preheat the comodo to do classic to 400 degrees roughly because the taken baked pizza that we're going to cook here first the instructions on the package say very specifically to cook that pizza at 400 degrees for 17 to 19 minutes and there is absolutely no reason that we should not follow those instructions cooking that pizza any hotter than that is not going to benefit at any so the first thing you want to do for taking baked pizza is follow the instructions so you want to pre-heat your grill you need to fire your grill up early at least an hour or maybe even 90 minutes early because you want it stable at 400 degrees which means it's been sitting here at 400 degrees for at least 15 or 20 minutes without you having the lid open or having to make any vent adjustments another nice tool to have and your pizza baking arsenal is an infrared thermometer and this is a relatively inexpensive one that I picked up from thermal works and the reason these are nice to have is because you can see you can use them to determine the temperature of your pizza stone so as you can see I'm fairly stable here at 400 degrees so let's see where our pizza stone is I'm going to take a reading here and it's reading at 4 419 420 right in the center of the stone which is right where we need it to be it doesn't matter that it's 15 or 20 degrees off that's not going to make any difference so I'm going to close the lid back and we'll restabilized here at 400 and we'll be back to put the pizza on okay we're going to pop the lid and we are going to put our taken baked pizza right on the stone and it says on the instruction 17 to 19 minutes so we'll be back okay guys we've been going right out about 17 minutes which was the prescribed time for this pizza and it looks perfect and that's another thing you have to do when you're cooking pizza it's got to look right so this one's kind of bowed up a little bit but that's kind of the nature of a take in baked pizza sometimes so we're going to pull this off and take it inside and have a look okay I brought this back in and cut it apart and we'll have a look here see if I can flip that guy over you can see the crust here is perfect there's a no problems with the crust let's have a look at across from the other side opposite side of the pizza same situation it's cooked evenly all the way across no problems here at all following the instructions provided on the packaging and once again you're going to want to do that you're not going to want to deviate because this pizza doesn't matter where it came from is set up to cook at that temperature so we're going to leave that here one of the other things you're going to notice here is I use the wooden pizza peel to put that pizza on the Kamado and I use the middle one take it off we're going to talk about that in the next pizza and the next pizza that we're going to bake is going to be a scratch made pizza where we have bought pre-made dough from the grocery store so let's move on to that okay so moving on we are going to make a pizza from scratch and we are going to use dough that I bought in the bakery at Publix this comes in a plastic bag it's a one-pound dough ball which will make a pretty big pizza so you could actually make two smaller pizzas out of this and on the back it gives you some tips on making pizza and one of the first things it recommends is preheating your oven to 400 degrees so that's telling me right away that this dome is set up to be good at 400 degrees as you read through the ingredients on this it does have sugar and oil in it so you know right away that this dough is not going to work well in extreme temperatures so just for fun on this pizza I'm probably going to set up at 450 just just to push it a little bit and we'll see how that goes I think it will be okay at 450 and this dough is also refrigerated and I got a good tip from a friend who's used this dough before it tells you on here to take this dough out of the refrigerator and let it warm up for an hour before you try to make it but I recommend letting it go at least 3 hours maybe even 4 take this out early so this dough can relax and it will be easier to form and it won't it won't try to compress back in when you make when you shape it into your pizza okay I've got the Big Joe set up just like we set up the classic for the last cook except I'm using the accessory rack underneath here today instead of the grill grease just to show that you can use this either way I've got both halves of my heat deflectors up top I've got my spacers here that are giving me an inch and a quarter of space between the heat deflector and the piece of stone so I'm going to let this grill preheat to 450 degrees and I'm going to let it stabilize there for probably 35 45 minutes before we actually get ready to cook this pizza because I want this to be completely heat saturated and we'll take a temperature reading of the stone before we start just to see where it is as well okay I've got our pizza with the Publix dough put together here and after I got my bows stretched out which just for your information on this particular dough was quite difficult I'm going to have a hard time recommending this dough because of that but it'll work and we'll talk more about that later I floured up my pizza peel just with all-purpose flour transferred my dough to the peel and I made my pizza on top of the peel and one of the things you want to check when you're using a dough like this is how easily you're going to be able to transfer from the peel to the pizza stone so you just pick your peel up and see if you can jiggle the pizza like that see if it's going to slide on there if it's not you may have trouble with it when you get to the grill so this guy is ready for the grill okay our big Joe's ready my dome temperatures about 425 or 430 it's been sitting there for quite a while so we're going to check the stone temperature the stone temperature here in the middle is about 485 which is okay and it cools off a little bit out towards the edge down to around about 440 so we'll slide our pizza right on here and we're probably going to cook somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes we've been going about 15 minutes or so and I'm going to call this guy ready it looks real good I've got a nice crust on it so we're gonna take this off take it inside and have a taste okay guys I let this Pizza cool a little bit and I've cut it and let's have a look at the bottom you know we've got a really nice cook there it's perfect it's looking one on the other side very nice so this is the Publix pre-made dough that's in a dough ball and what I was telling you earlier with this pizza I had a hard time stretching it the gluten content and that dough is really high and I like I said I'll let the dough stay out for almost four hours before I tried to stretch it to get it to relax a little bit somebody warned me I might have that problem so when your dough wants to snap back when you're stretching it out what you have to do is just stretch it and then let it sit for 10 minutes and come back and stretch it some more and eventually it loosens up it just takes a little while but I'm also told that Publix makes that same dough that's pre roll rolled out and ready to go so you might want to try that so this will conclude our section on baking with store-bought dough on our next video we will make a homemade dough and go through this exact same process again and so we'll be back to see you then I put together another pizza this is made from a homemade dough from scratch I'm going to stop the video right here and put up a screen where I'm going to give you the recipe and the brief instructions on how to make this dough okay I've got our commodity classic warmed up to somewhere between five and five hundred and fifty degrees with the same setup we've been using so let's take this guy out and cook it alright we've got the classic warmed up my dome temperature here is right at 550 and my stone temperature I just checked and it's right at about 540 so we're going to lift them and get this pizza on the stone and I'll start my timer we'll see how long it takes to cook okay guys we've been going just right at ten minutes or so and I believe this guy is ready it looks beautiful so we're going to take it off take it inside let it cool for a minute and then we'll have a look okay guys this guy's ready to cut so we're going to cut it into pieces and then have a look I usually like to cut pieces this size into about six and we'll do like we've been doing we'll have a look at the bottom crust it's perfectly cooked no problems there whatsoever and one from the opposite side looks just as good so that's going to cover our basic homemade pizza dough real easy to make real cheap to make also and there's a lot of things you can do with this and at the end of this video I'll try to talk about some enhanced techniques on the recipe so now that this ones are done what we've got to do is go to the extremely high temperature cook so we will go to that high temperature Neapolitan style pizza next here we are at the final stage of this process I've got another pizza put together here and we're going to cook this one at a really high temperature and this is the same pizza recipe or same pizza crust recipe that we used in the previous homemade pizza dough but there's less water in it if you'll I'll pop that screen back up here in a second if you look at the numbers in red that's the only thing that's changed the water content of the dough is always change so let's go get our grill going okay I've had the classic lit up here for a little while and I've got the bottom vent fully open and the top vent just fully off of the grill and I'm a little over eight hundred and twenty-five degrees or so like I said I've just got the top vent completely off and I'm going to try to let it go for a little while longer see if we can get up close to 900 and let it stay there for just a couple of minutes because that's where you would normally cook a Neapolitan style pizza which is close to what we have here so we're going to give the grill just a few more minutes to warm up before we put the pizza on okay we're up to ten we're running about nine twenty five in the dome and our stone temp is up to 900 so I'm going to slowly open this burp it a little bit we're going to slide our pizza right on here and give it about two minutes oK we've been going about a minute so I'm going to crack this open a little bit and we're going to give it a a quick turn and give it another minute or so okay we are just approaching the two-minute mark here so this pizza is ready to come off we're going to yank it off of there and take it in and have a look okay this pizza is done it's ready to cut and you see we've got some of that nice leopard in that you look for on this type of pizza that's one of the characteristics of this and we set up the exact same way you know with our spacers our inch and a quarter two inch and a half spacers to keep the pizza stone from going ballistic with us but everything's ballistic on a cook like this so we're going to cut this so I can show you what the bottom of this crust looks like this pizza is going to be fantastic there should be a little charring on the bottom of this crust but it should not be burned so there we have it have a look at the same piece on the other side look at that that's absolutely perfect so that's how you take care of the high temperature pizza and since this is dinner I'm going to stop here we're going to eat this pizza and then I'm going to by and we're going to wrap this video up I'm going to talk about the bullet points of the points that we're trying to make with this video and try to clear up anything that might not be clear okay we have demonstrated the four basic types of pizza cooks that you can do on the quemado grill we started out with a taken bake and then we went to a store-bought dough where we added our own toppings then we went to a simple scratch dough for a standard temperature cook and then we went to a modified scratch do for the Neapolitan the extremely high temperature cooks so we've covered most of the bases that you've ever come across the bullet points that you need to take away from this video are the first thing is is how we set up our heat deflector and our pizza stone that heat deflector needs to be at the top level of a grill not in the middle or not at the low position on the divide-and-conquer rack you want that up high you want one and a quarter to one and a half inch spacers of some sort to set on those heat deflectors and then set your pizza stone on top of that and the reason for that is that allows your stone temperature to stabilize at about the same temperature as the dome that way you don't have to worry about the stone getting too hot where your piece is going to scorch at your given dome temperature so the next thing is after you have that set up when you bring your grill up to temperature you want to let it stabilize there for 20 to 30 minutes before you put your pizza on that way this stone can be up to temperature where it will be hot enough to do everything you need to do so that's the setup and like I said the taking baked pizzas you need to follow the temperature instructions on the packaging if you go hot on a taking bake pizza you're going to ruin it and that's one of the most common failures we see here is over too much temperature for that type of pizza there's a myth out there I'm not really sure how it got started but the myth is that the hotter you cook the pizza the better it is well that is only true if your pizza is designed to handle that kind of heat so to take in Bakke you've got to follow the instructions on the box if you are using store-bought pizza though like the Publix pizza dough that we use you need to follow the instructions that come along with it also because it is geared for whatever temperature they're telling you to cook at it's going to be having the proper water content and it's got oils and sugars in it that can't handle high temperatures either so the homemade pizza dough's that we made we made two different variations of the same dough the the 500 to 550 degree dough is a 70 70 % hydration it's gotten more water in it and the reason it has more water it's because it's going to be on the grill for a longer time and it just helps keep the dough from burning over that longer cooking you can put a little bit more on your pizza topping rise because you're going to be cooking from 12 to 18 minutes or so depending on what type of pizza you're making the Neapolitan pizza that we just finished up was a lower hydration though it was only 60% instead of 70% and it can handle the high temperature I see if I can explain this easily it's got less water in it but it's going to be on the grill for a shorter amount of time that's 70% dough that we made you can also cook the 70% dough at 900 degrees the difference you're going to see when you cook that dough at 900 degrees is it's not going to brown up nicely it's not going to char and give us that little leopard in the caramelization that we like to see on the crust on that style of pizza because of the extra water content so you can do it either way you can cook that 70% dough at 900 degrees if you want to but you cannot do the opposite you cannot take the 60% dough and cook it at 500 or 550 for 15 or 18 minutes because it doesn't have enough water in it to support a cook that long and it will burn it's kind of funny so I hope this has been useful I've been wanting to make this video for a long time because I love pizza from the commader Joe it's just it's a beautiful pizza oven but I keep seeing everybody wants to try and I keep seeing a lot of burnt pizzas so I wanted to make this video to show you how to never ever mess up another pizza so give some of these guys a try let me know what you think join us on facebook facebook.com slash komodo jo follow us on twitter at kimono jo until next time this is John Sessler with the kimono joke Pizza Channel

Channel: Kamado Joe

Views: 387,300

Rating: 4.6981707 out of 5

Keywords: pizza, kamado, recipe, neapolitan, home made, homemade, crust, kamado joe, big green egg, artisan, technique

Id: 9Db8YVKZqlg

Length: 22min 55sec (1375 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2017