High temp pizza success!

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I have been reading here for a while getting ideas to make pizza like I had in Southern Italy and the greats in USA (Lombardi's, Patsys, Bianco, etc.) I have a long way to go to make great pizza but I'm getting closer with the help of everyone here.

Ingredients aside, I wanted to be able to get high temp at home without buying an expensive pizza oven that takes hours to heat. Efforts on the grill and home oven produce expected results of flat, tough crust. I decided to buy a Big Green Egg for under $1000 and try it.

My first attempt on my large egg was using a plate setter and a 16" pizza stone. I could not get it past 650 and it fried the gasket. The problem is all the heat builds up beneath the stone and does not get past to the dome. The heat below is so extreme it melted the standard gasket.

BGE sent me a special high temp gasket. I also bought a 14" Fibramat pizza stone thinking the small diameter would allow more heat to reach the dome.

My second time I started the egg without the plate setter or stone and waited until it hit 950 (15 min). Then I put the plate setter and 14" stone in with alum foil under the stone. I'm not sure this is necessary since the plate setter covers at least 90% of the stone. Then I waited until the surface of the stone hit 750 using digital thermo. At this point the dome was around 850 or so. The new gasket was fried but I did not care.

I put in my pizza and it puffed up like I have never seen. I'm used to 6 min. pizzas on my regular BBQ grill so I let the first one go about 2 and half min and it burnt the crust. My second one was perfect in 2 min. Sorry no pictures this time because I was not expecting it to work.

So, done right, the BGE will do the job. There are however some cautions. At those temps the metal band around the egg gets lose so you have to be careful. Also, as I mentioned the gasket will fry so you will need to buy an aftermarket high temp gasket for $15 to solve that problem. But the rest is bliss :chef:

ps. I don't know the long term effects on the BGE by using it this way.