Tips for making a wood-fired pizza

Here are some of the tips that I learned while perfecting my KettlePizza technique.

Use charcoal briquettes rather than lump charcoal, and use a lot of them. Briquettes don’t burn as hot as the lump, but they burn longer.

You’ll need two to three chimneys’ worth of charcoal to get the heat you want for the length of time you’ll need it.

Arrange the briquettes in a C shape, and make sure that you stack them higher in the back (this improves the flow of hot air over the top of the pizza).

You have to be much more proactive about managing the fire than you do in normal grilling; once you’ve got the temperature you want, shut down the top vents almost entirely and close the bottom vents halfway to maintain the burn.

Keep the pizza stone relatively close to the front of the grill. The farther back it is, the more uneven the heat.

Expect to rotate the pizza two or three times to get even browning.

Keep the toppings simple and relatively spare. Especially at first, loading down the pizza with ingredients will make it harder to get from peel to stone.

Work quickly when building the pizza. Even well-floured dough will start to stick to the peel if it is left alone, and that’s especially true once you’ve started to add toppings.