Weber

Since the sun was out, my brother and I got out the barbecue to make some pizza for what turned out to be an incredibly long lunch. The Weber has an insert to turn it into a pizza oven which gets sandwiched between the grill and the lid. I put a pizza stone on the bottom, and a big piece of circular steel (and a load of tin foil to make sure there were no gaps) on the shelf above to help the pizza cook on the top. We struggled to get the fire hot enough at first but once we started throwing in wood chips the temperature gauge on the front quickly maxed out (and in fact totally burnt so we couldn’t even see it eventually). We did have to constantly throw in wood chips to keep it hot – and by we, I mean Theo, who spent a long time crouching by the barbecue with smoke in his eyes trying to throw handfuls of wood chips through the fairly small hole in the front while being rained on (the sun did not stay out).

As far as the pizza itself goes, I used a Neapolitan dough that rose overnight (recipe here) and topped it with some passata, mozzarella and some strange overpriced Hungarian sausage which was the closest thing to pepperoni Waitrose had (but was delicious). The stone was so hot for some of the pizzas that the bottom cooked in about 30 seconds meaning I had to spent quite a while in front of the Weber holding the pizzas right near the roof to brown, also being attacked by an onslaught of smoke to the eyes.

Despite a couple of burnt bottoms, this turned out to be some of the best pizza I’ve ever made at home, so once I’ve bought myself some goggles to stave off the smoke from my eyes, I’ll be getting this out a whole lot more.