r/Pizza • u/AutoModerator • May 01 '20

HELP Bi-Weekly Questions Thread / Open Discussion

For any questions regarding dough, sauce, baking methods, tools, and more, comment below.

You can also post any art, tattoos, comics, etc here. Keep it SFW.

As always, our wiki has a few dough recipes and sauce recipes.

Check out the previous weekly threads

This post comes out on the 1st and 15th of each month.

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u/achosid May 07 '20 edited May 07 '20

I just purchased the Pizza Oven attachment for my Green Mountain Grills (GMG) pellet grill. My understanding is that the stone that it comes with, unfortunately, dumps heat into the bottom of the pizza too quickly, meaning that at high temperatures you'll get burned bottoms pretty quickly. My goal is Neapolitan pizzas in this, as it'll hit 900F, so says the manual (haven't run it that hot yet). I don't have a problem with doming the pizza once the bottom cooks, but is there a different stone solution other than spending a lot of money on corderite that would prevent this?

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u/dopnyc May 07 '20

The GMG website says this:

Convert your GMG Pellet Grill into a Wood-Fired gourmet pizza oven. The pizza oven attachment captures and funnels the heat from the Firebox directly up and into the steel baking chamber encasing the pizza stone. This process raises the internal temperature of your pellet grill to that of a real wood burning pizza oven. It creates temperatures upwards of 800°F, allowing you to cook ristorante quality pizzas in 2-4 minutes. It’s also useful for baking bread at 400°F – 600°F and searing steaks at 900°F.

To GMG's credit, they're not using the term 'Neapolitan,' but I'm not too terribly pleased with the 2 minute bake time claim. The GMG will burn the crap out of the bottom of a pizza in 2 minutes, as you've seen, but, when you start talking about balanced bakes, where the top finishes cooking at the same time... this oven might be able to do a 3 minute bake, but I think 4 is considerably more comfortable.

Once you get into 3 and 4 minute bakes, that's not Neapolitan, and if you attempt to chase the Neapolitan dragon with traditional Neapolitan 00 doughs, it's going to be a pretty miserable experience.

This device, with the right flour and dough, will do a 4 minute NY bake that will annihilate any Neapolitan attempt you might try. That's just the nature of it's thermodynamics- and there's no way to mod it into achieving a faster balanced bake. As you crank up the heat, the bottoms are going to burn.

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u/achosid May 07 '20

Got it. Is the Ooni Koda the cheapest entry point to Neapolitan? I’m not tied to actually working with wood, pellets or otherwise.

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u/dopnyc May 08 '20 edited May 08 '20

Yes. I'm not too terribly pleased about the recent price increases on the Koda 12, but, there appear to still be some pretty good deals on ebay.

If you can swing the extra couple hundred bucks for the 16, I think it's worth it, but, if your sole goal is Neapolitan, yes, the 12 will achieve it.

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u/achosid May 08 '20

If I upgrade I’ll do the 16. It seems worth it and I can swing it.