Cooked the pizza, not the gasket.

Jersey Doug

My first attempt at pizza a couple of months ago on the Small resulted in a cooked gasket.* I've been making pizza every Saturday since then, fine tuning the setup and the procedure. Without a good seal to start with, the gasket just got worse and worse.

Fast forward to earlier this week. I finally installed the felt gasket I've had on the shelf since the initial fiasco. I did a couple of relatively low temperature cooks - country style spareribs on Thursday and Salmon fillet on Friday. And then it was Saturday. Should I cook the pizzas on the Large, which has never given me a problem, or give the Small the benefit of the doubt? I went with the Small.

The setup was fresh lump to the top of the firebox, a 9" stainless pot lid on Chubby's GrateMates ring to deflect the heat, and a 12" BGE pizza stone up in the dome on the tall GrateMates. I stabilized the dome temperature at 450º and cooked the thin crust pizzas for 13-14 minutes. The pizzas were good, but I knew they would be because I've been cooking them that way for a while now. The pleasant surprise is that the gasket still looks like new. Indirect cooks aren't, in and of themselves, a problem.

* The setup for the ill-fated first pizza cook was the same fresh lump to the top of the firebox, a plate setter legs down, the same 12" BGE pizza stone on top of the same tall GrateMates, and a dome temperature of 550º. I believe the problem was that with the legs down the plate setter directed the hotter air directly at three locations on the gasket. It was easy to see from the burn pattern where the openings between the legs of the plate setter had been.

Zippylip

ah, the joys of baking pizza and cooking gaskets

Grandpas Grub

Thanks for sharing.

GG