Thursday, September 06, 2007

Pizza Spectacular


For my birthday I was the happy recipient of a VillaWare Stainless-Steel Pizza Grill. For some time I have been making pizza on the grill as well as in the oven without the benefit of any pizza stone. Overall, I was quite happy with the results but the pizza monster inside of me always wanted to try a pizza stone.

The challenge was trying a pizza stone on a grill. Technically speaking, one can not use a baking stone directly on an open flame. Not sure if this is folk lore or the actual truth but I read it on the internet and as we all know if it is on the internet, it must be true.

A combo pizza stone and rack seemed to be the way to go and the reviews have always been positive for the VillaWare product. Amazon has it for a great price and with my Amazon Prime membership I got it in two days for free shipping. Hard to shake a pizza crust at that!

We decided to make two pizzas, a cheese pizza for the sou chef and a sort of margarita pizza for us.

The sou chef did her usual great job of assembling the pizza-

a little bit of sauce



a little bit of cheese



even more cheese



then onto the Pizza Grill



for some tasty results



Our pizza was equally as tasty




Fresh tomatoes from Volante Farms, mozzarella from Maplebrook Farm (you can buy it at Roche Brothers, Sudbury Farms and Whole Foods and basil from our 'garden'



So how were the results? The sou chef has proclaimed that it was the best pizza ever and she now only wants to eat daddy's bar-b-que pizza. I liked the crust that the pizza stone created. The built in thermometer was very handy as my Weber one has died a slow death some time ago.


What are my complaints? For starters the thing needs to heat up for about 20 minutes, this combined with any additional grilling sucks a lot of LP out of the gas tank. The other two 'issues' is that the Pizza grill takes up a lot of space on my Weber. Not the grills fault but of course now I need a bigger grill and finally, if you make pizza as an appetizer the questions of where one puts a wicked hot pizza grill and frame is a bit of an issue.


For less then seventy five dollars with free shipping this was a great deal in my mind.

1 comment:

T.W. Barritt at Culinary Types said...

Looks like a great gadget, despite any drawbacks. I think there is nothing better than homemade pizza.