Pellet Grill Pepperoni Pizza

One of the ways I'd seen people using their pellet grills was as a pizza oven so I wanted to see how using it for usual pizza recipe would affect the final product.  I started with my usual dough recipe, which is supposed to be a clone of Mellow Mushroom's dough.   finally had a chance to eat at one of their restaurants when I visited family in Florida in June and decided to make a few changes to see if I could get a bit closer.  First thing is that their dough seems to have less molasses than mine so I swapped out half of molasses in the recipe with honey, that seemed to work out well.  The other thing I did was try to use up some 00 flour I had from when I tried a clone of Roberta's Pizzeria dough recipe, that didn't turn out as well.  I replaced about 1/2 of the regular bread flour with 00 flour and made the dough as usual.  After kneading, portioning and rounding I coated the dough balls with oil and put them in the refrigerator to cold-ferment for 2 days.  On the day of the cook a dough ball was removed from the refrigerator and allowed to sit (covered) at room temperature for ~ 90 minutes to come up to temp, when you form cold dough in to skins and bake them off you end up with huge bubbles so tempering the dough is critical.  I then set up the Camp Chef pellet grill by placing a pizza stone on the grates and filling the hopper with Treager Signature Blend Pellets, I thought the blend would work better than the cherry pellets I had used for the pulled pork cook a few weeks earlier.  About 30 minutes till cook time I turned on the pellet grill and turned the dial to 11 (the dial says "High" but I read that as "11").  The temperature at high got up to around 465° which is close to the temperature I use for this particular dough in the inside oven.  Now it was time to form the skin and get the pizza ready for the grill and it was here that I learned that the 00 flour I had wasn't the same as the 00 flour I had used for pizza dough in the past.  The dough didn't have a lot of gluten development so stretching it out by hand resulted in the dough tearing, I eventually had to settle on rolling it out with a pin.  Once I finally got the skin stretched out it was placed on parchment paper which was trimmed so it wouldn't overhang the pizza stone and placed on a pizza peel for dressing. 

Toppings were kept simple, sauce I had on hand, whole milk mozzarella and pepperoni on top.  I wasn't sure how long this would take to cook properly so after loading the pizza on to the atone and closing the lid I set a timer for 5 minutes and waited.  After checking and seeing it wasn't nearly done I repeated checking after 5 minutes until the cheese on top was beginning to brown, took a total of ~ 15 minutes.  After removing the pizza and putting the pellet grill in to shutdown mode it was tie to eat!

 With the exception of the dough not being up to snuff the pizza was really good, the smoke flavor was there but not overwhelming.  Next time I try this I'll keep the 1/2 molasses and 1/2 honey change to the dough but use all bread flour instead of cutting it with 00 flour (unless I can find some locally that specifies it's for pizza).  That should allow me to stretch out the skin the way I like with a really thin center with a good puffy edge.  The bottom of the crust was a little over-browned for my taste, but not burnt.  Rather than just letting the top brown from heat radiated down from the grill lid I may break out my Searzall next time and use it to brown the top once the bottom of the crust is cooked to my liking.  Lots of room for experimenting here!