Thanks, but I much prefer your earlier sauce recipe suggestion:
Perhaps using:
They’re both surprisingly good. There’s also a riff on that second one that adds garlic, sugar, oil and oregano that’s also good for a NY style.
If you happen to already have a Weber (or similar) kettle grill there are inserts you can get to convert it to a pizza oven. One of my neighbors has one of these and it seems to work really well. I think he uses it with a steel, though, and not a stone.
Interesting! i do have a Weber kettle grill. The price is definitely right for the conversion kit. Thanks for the rec!
As it so happens, my son came home from school and decided he wanted to make himself some pizza for dinner today, so he asked me if I could make him some sauce. I showed him how to make the Kenji Lopez- style sauce. I had all the ingredients except for fresh basil, only dried, which is a shame; dried oregano is great but dried basil is a pale imitation of fresh. But, whaddaya gonna do but make do.
I got him started, with instructions to stir occasionally for an hour until the sauce is reduced by half.
Will report back on how it turns out!
So the sauce and my son’s pizza turned out really well.
The only step I wish I could convince him to cut out is, he makes a garlic Parmesan butter sauce that he brushes on the crust, and I think it’s too much. His pizza is delicious enough to stand on its own; it’s too rich with the butter sauce. That, I think, is a gimmick best reserved for a lesser pizza like a Hungry Howe’s. But he thinks it’s next level.
This is where the world divides in two. The dough bubbling, inflating and charring is, for me, the best bit.
I had to google ‘dough docker’. Then I said “ohhh, that’s why my son pierces his formed dough with a fork a million times”.
We have a thick pizza stone we use in our oven and it works well. We’ve also used it on our bbq, as mentioned, with great results. One tip for a regular oven is to elevate the stone to one of the uppermost racks - the reflective heat from the top of the oven produces that nice char. I probably would not go out of my way for a single-purpose item like a wood pizza oven when there are likely other viable options already in my kitchen.
I used to have a proper brick-built pizza oven (forno) in the garden, back when I had a second home in southern Italy. I think I could have fed the village with the size of it. I used it a few times but felt it was a bit wasteful taking several hours getting it up to temperature just to cook a couple of pizzas. Ooni pizza oven ads follow my around when I’m surfing and I’m very tempted, but it seems a bit OTT considering I only make pizza very occasionally. I might look into the weber attachment…
Follow up time! I ended up purchasing this kettle grill pizza oven kit. I set it up yesterday and my son and I cooked up some pizzas last night. It worked great! the setup gets the grill plenty blazing hot. Uses a LOT of charcoal though-- they recommended 10 lbs.(!) of charcoal, plus a few wood chunks if you wish. I cut back on the charcoal a little bit-- I probably used 7 or 8 lbs. and threw 4 good-sized wood chunks on. Was still plenty hot enough. My son said, your temperature gauge on the grill lid is broken. I said no, that’s because the needle went past the highest 600 degree mark all the way over to just before the ‘0’ because it’s so hot. I would estimate it was easily ~800 degrees.
We made 3 delicious pizzas. My son was very happy with the results! I should have taken a pic to share, but they were devoured too quickly 
Forno Bravo has plans and kits for brick ovens, along with plenty of general information. I built one based on their plans, it worked out quite well, and it was a lot of fun to do. Along with the wife and kids we finished up the dome in one weekend with everyone helping to mix mortar, cut bricks and stone, and place the bricks. I took a risk and did it without a steel lintel over the door, just using a brick arch there, I was worried it would all collapse as soon as it we fired up to full heat but the principle worked and it’s still really solid.
He’s well on his way! The two things that really improved my pizza dough were:
- Using bread flour instead of all-purpose; and
- Using an overnight rise recipe like this one.
Those, coupled with good ingredients, make pizza night a treat. But it’s fun to read of other folks’ adventures and how y’all make them fancy.
Thanks for the tips, LHoD! He does use an overnight rise recipe; he is very serious about his dough. I think he uses all-purpose flour though- I will suggest bread flour to him.
Another advantage to a steel is that it also makes fantastic flatbreads (tortillas, naan/roti/chapati, pita, etc…)
Bread flour is higher in gluten, which will make for a chewier, crispier, springier dough than AP flour. But it’ll take some getting used to- you can’t just sub it straight in for AP.
Hey, two brand-new posts from bump, to two of my older threads, that bumped them each from being two months since the last reply. Way to live up to your handle, bump!
Anyway, I did go ahead and buy him the bread flour, but he decided to stick with all-purpose for now. At least for making pizza crust-- he makes bread and pretzels too… not sure what he’s using for those.
He also had me buy some pure semolina flour, just to put under the dough so the pizza is less likely to stick to the pizza stone, since it’s more grainy than regular flour-- the way some pizzerias use coarse cornmeal for the same purpose.
I’ve always had trouble with the dough sticking to the peel, so I just use parchment paper. Slides right off. The paper does brown up at pizza temperatures but doesn’t actually burn.
The temperature difference seems to be enough to keep it from sticking to the stone, or at least I’ve never had anything stick to it.
He has a regular youtube video chan that’s great but also this reddit alternate persona. But amazing shots of his wood fired pizza oven below.
I caught this video of a hilarious Aussie bbq’r:
All of his reddit videos are gold.