Sausage, Basil, and Red Sweet Pepper Pizza

A hot pizza stone gives the crust that brick oven crisp.

I bought my wife a pizza stone for Christmas about ten years ago.  Since then, we have used that thing in the oven to cook everything from biscuits to cinnamon rolls, pigs in a blanket to chocolate chip cookies.  To say that it's well seasoned is an understatement.  But not once, I mean never, did we ever used it the way it was intended.  Even when we would cook pizzas on it, we never preheated our pizza stone.  We were basically using it as a glorified cookie sheet.  I'm embarrassed to say we just didn't know any better.

All of that changed about a year ago.  My horizontal cooker, a Brinkmann grill with an offset smoker box affectionately dubbed "Mr. Draper's Grill" because my best friend and I rescued it from the rubble of Hurricane Katrina (a story for another day), had to be retired because, well, nobody likes rust in their food.  Therefore, I was in the market for another grill.  My wife and I headed to Lowe's in search of another horizontal cooker.  As we walked around looking at a couple of different possibilities, I couldn't help but eyeball the ceramic, kamado style cooker sitting there calling out to me.  The problem; I couldn't afford forking out a grand for a grill.  And then I saw it.  Sitting right there next to the ceramic cooker was a steel, double wall insulated version of a kamado cooker made by Char-Griller for three hundred bucks!  I hadn't read much about the kamado cookers yet, so I headed home and began reading up on this style of cooking.  Basically, a kamado cooker consists of an egg-shaped vessel with an opening in the bottom and top and the ability to change the size of both openings to have complete control of the temperature.  Most are made of ceramic, but a few less expensive versions are made of insulated steel.  One of the words I kept seeing when reading about this type of cooker was "versatile."  So we bought it and it has forever changed the way I cook with wood.  Although I would like to one day upgrade to the Primo Oval XL, the Char-Griller Akorn is a great place to start when it comes to cooking a lot of different kinds of food with wood.

When I decided to try pizza on my new cooker, I knew that a quality pizza stone was crucial.  So I bought a thick stone, sixteen inches in diameter, that was made for grills.  I knew I needed something that could handle the high heat of a grill and I also discovered that the trick was to preheat the stone to between 450 and 500 degrees.  In order to know that the temperature was where it needed to be at grate level, I also invested in a digital, remote thermometer with a sensor that clips directly to the grill grate.

Corn meal sprinkled on the pizza peel will help it slide onto the stone.

Armed with the right tools for the job, we began making pizzas.  Although we make a lot of different pizzas, this one is my favorite.  Before we start doing any rolling out of dough or pizza decorating, I head out to the grill and get a chimney starter full of lump charcoal lit.  As soon as it's ready, I dump it into the grill and add a couple of chucks of hickory or pecan, depending on what I have at the time.  I put the pizza stone down on the grill grate, get my thermometer sensor set, and close the lid.  I bring the temperature up to about 475 and then let it stay there for about an hour.  This lets the pizza stone come all the way up to 475 as well.

We get our pizza dough from Publix.  We prefer the multigrain but will use whatever they have available at the time.  One bag of dough will make two pizzas so my wife splits the dough in half after letting it come up to room temperature.  She rolls the dough out pretty thin and then moves it over to the pizza peel.  Now here's where things get a little weird, but just trust me.  We never use tomato sauce on our pizzas.  No matter what toppings go on the pizza, we begin by lightly coating the dough with Williamson Brothers Barbeque Sauce.  Follow it with a little cheese, diced red bell peppers, fresh basil, Johnsonville Sweet Italian Sausage that's already been cooked and sliced, and then finish it with more cheese.

Out to the grill I go.  I slide the pizza on to the pizza stone and close the lid.  It usually only takes about five minutes or so to cook, but I know it's ready if I lift the edge a little and the dough has just begun to brown underneath.  Don't leave it too long or the dough will burn.  Our first time at this was a disaster!  When it's done, scoop it up with the pizza peel, let it cool for a few minutes, and then cut and serve.