Sweet Spot Cooking

The Big Green Egg can make fantastic pizza. It can get extremely hot, has a stone cooking floor, and uses wood for fuel. All of the parts are right there wrapped in green ceramic glaze. The trick is to cook pizza in the narrow sweet spot of temperatures. The Pizza-Porta is designed to make that sweet spot predictable and available all night long.

Here is what happens when you light your BGE to make pizza without a Pizza-Porta. The air temperature (from the built-in thermometer) goes up right away. The ceramic begins to heat up, the dome begins to absorb and then radiate heat and there is a period of time where all of the different components are at the right temperature to cook a pizza. This is the sweet spot on the graph below. The challenge is that this sweet spot only happens once with a conventional setup and it is really difficult to predict when. Before the sweet spot, the stone does not cook the crust enough but the top is cooked well. In the middle of this sweet spot the temperature of the dome and the stone are close so the pizza cooks perfectly. Once you have passed the sweet spot, the stone is too hot and the dome is too cool so the crust gets burned. Unfortunately, there is no way back to the sweet spot in this cooking session.

Other observations: The dome temperature and the thermometer temperature are not the same. The thermometer shows air temperature not dome temperature and will drop when the dome is open. Every time you open the oven it cools the dome taking away the radiant cooking capability. Even with the dome closed, most of the heat flows out of the chimney. As you can see, without air control, the conditions do not align for great pizza.

The Pizza-Porta takes a different approach. By capping the chimney, all of the heat is captured in the dome keeping its temperature in the cooking zone. This heat is then radiated to cook the top of the pizza. Keeping the door closed provides a closed chamber allowing the air vents to control airflow. Control the airflow and you control the temperature as BGE has taught us throughout the year. This temperature management keeps the stone and dome temperatures in alignment, extending that sweet spot throughout the night. Your first pizza and your last pizza will be cooked evenly and predictably.

Whether you are cooking one pizza or 20, it is critical that you have control of your oven. Many customers have exclaimed that cooking with the Pizza-Porta makes pizza night so much less stressful. When you can count on the oven being in the pizza cooking sweet spot, cooking pizza is a different experience.

Cheers!

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