Steel pizza stones are not Ideal in a Pizza-Porta
Steel pizza stone - Amazon
During the development of Pizza-Porta we cooked thousands of pizzas and tried about every configuration we could assemble. We wanted to make sure that if a pizza product was on the market for the Egg or the KJ we would know how well it worked. There are a couple of products that we do not want to bash because they work great in other instances, but they wreak havoc on a pizza in a Pizza-Porta.
1) Cast Iron cooking grates used as spacers. The heavy material of a cast iron cooking grate gets heated up around the perimeter of the plate setter and the energy is spread to the center and overheats the pizza stone. The cast iron has enough mass to hold heat rather than dissipate heat. Use a stainless steel cooking grate, or another method to create a gap between the stone and the platesetter/deflector if your grill has a heavy cast-iron grate. A cast-iron platesetter on the other hand works fine as a deflector because it is shading the pizza stone from the energy of the fire. Just make sure to isolate the plate setter from the pizza stone with an air gap.
2) Steel or cast-iron pizza “stones”. I tried and tried to figure out how to use a metal or cast-iron stone. These pizza cooking devices were developed for home oven cooking. A home oven is tightly regulated to be entirely 450F-500F in the interior. This is a relatively low temperature for cooking a pizza so you need a surface that recovers quickly and transmits as much energy as possible to the crust. A kamado grill on the other hand has a roaring fire in the bottom. A metal stone will transmit too much of this energy to the pizza crust. A “stone” pizza stone does a better job of losing heat which helps manage the excess energy of the fire much better. Here is a recommendation of steel for home oven use - everything that makes it great for the home oven makes it bad for a grill.
Because they're made from steel, pizza steels are extremely efficient at conducting heat. ... In addition to transferring heat at lightning speed, pizza steels are also better at retaining heat than pizza stones. -www.thkitchn.com
3) Bricks or other solid spacers. These are not steel, but they create the same problem of transmitting too much energy from the plate setter to the pizza stone. If the plate setter reaches 1000F because the fire is heating it directly, the brick will soon reach 1000F, and then the pizza stone will reach 1000F as the heat transfers directly from one item to the next. An air gap with an inefficient conductor will break this thermal transfer.
The objective of the Pizza-Porta is to capture as much energy in the ceramic of the dome so that it will balance the excess energy from below the pizza stone. Any device that amplifies or holds additional heat under the pizza will overcome this tenuous balance. At higher temperature cooking, adding additional deflection below the pizza stone will be advantageous.
Cheers!
Cortlandt
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