Making pizza with a 2Stone Pizza Grill (Moved from Blahg Tech)

A few years ago, a thread was started on PizzaMaking.com entitled "Reverse engineered coal fired brick oven".  The OP had created a pizza oven to fit on his Weber charcoal grill which mimicked the conditions and high temperatures found in a traditional coal fired brick oven.  The thread can be found here...
Reverse engineered coal fired brick oven 


I was really (and I mean REALLY) in to pizza at the time, so the oven intrigued me.  Before long I had placed my order and shortly thereafter received my 2Stone Pizza Grill.  The weather has been improving here in Chicago, so I decided to make some pizza for dinner last night.

To make a really great pizza you need to start at the bottom, the crust.  To stand up to the high temperatures a dough with a higher than usual hydration (water content) works best.  The dough formula I use for pizzas baked in my home oven (expressed in bakers percentages, I'll explain that later) is...

100% bread flour
60% to 62% cold water
2% salt
0.25% Instant Dry Yeast (IDY)

This is mixed in the Kitchenaid stand mixer, balled, rubbed down with oil and left to ferment in the refrigerator for 24-48 hours before use.  The dough I use for the 2Stone oven is this...

100% Caputo "00" pizzaria flour
70%-72% cold water
2% salt
0.25% -0.5% IDY
2% Extra Virgin Olive Oil

 The "00" flour I use is imported from Italy and is milled finer than American flours.  When I tried using American brands of flour such as King Arthur I had issues with the crusts sticking to the stone and burning, those problems have disappeared since I started using the Italian "00" flour.  It can be difficult to find a local supplier for this type of flour, but you can order it from Amazon 00 Pizza Flour Attimo Caputo or PennMac.com.  The method I use to make this dough it to make a sponge with the water, yeast and ~ 70% of the flour, which I cover and let ferment all day while I'm at work.  If I want to use it that night I use a higher percentage of yeast, but if I'm going to let the finished dough sit in the fridge until the next day (which does seem to improve flavor and texture) I will use the lower percentage of yeast.  When I get home from work I add the remaining flour and mix for ~ 2 minutes, then add the oil and continue mixing until the dough is smooth.  At that point the dough is dumped out on to a floured surface, rolled in to a ball (which can be tricky with a dough this loose!) and placed in a covered, oiled bowl to rise until needed.

The formulas posted above are in baker's percentages.  The weights of all ingredients are expressed as a percentage of the weight of the flour, which will always be 100%.  If more than one type of flour is used then the weights of the flours combined will equal 100%.  The reason that this method is preferred in commercial bakeries is that it makes it very easy to scale recipes up and down according to need.  The way to do this is simple.  First, you need to add all the percentages in a particular formula together.  For the dough formula above you add all the percentages (100% + 70% + 2% + 0.25% + 2% = 174.25%).  Convert that in to an integer and you get a conversion factor of 1.7425.  Now that you have that number, you can use to to find out the weight of flour required for any given weight of final dough.  Say you need 850 grams of pizza dough, just divide 850 by 1.7425 and you see that you'll need 487.8 grams of flour.  70% of 487.8 = 341.46 grams of water and so on.

Now that the dough was done and rising, it was time to set up the 2Stone.  I lit a chimney of charcoal and let it go until the coals on top started to turn white.  The chimney was dumped and I arranged the coals in even layer in the center of the grill, roughly 2" high and 13" square.  The 2Stone was then placed on the cooking grate over the coals and allowed to heat up with the grill cover placed on top.

I can usually get the oven up to 900-950 degrees, but I was hungry, I was impatient and I only had enough charcoal to fill the chimney 3/4 of the way.  Now it was time to stretch the dough, dress the pizza, cook and enjoy!

I was lazy on the sauce, it was just a store bought brand (Boboli) that I dressed up with oregano, basil, vinegar, sugar and oil.  There were some left over vegetables that I had grilled the night before (mushrooms, onions and peppers) that I diced up and added after saucing the dough, then topped with slices of whole milk mozzarella and finished with slices of Ezzo pepperoni I bought from Pennmac.com.  After baking I picked a few leaves of Basil off my AeroGrow and tore them over the top and drizzled the pie with some really good olive oil from Old Town Oil.  I have enough leftover dough in the fridge to do it again tonight if the weather cooperates!

The creator of this product has been making improvements and new models of this oven.  He sells them via his website, www.2Stonepg.com.