Although The Pizza Steel is designed for use in an oven, you can actually bake some really delicious pizzas on the barbecue. However, you do need to bear in mind that the steel can get very hot, so you should avoid direct heat from below (from charcoal or gas) as much as possible when baking, as you can easily end up with a burnt pizza :-(.

Charcoal barbecue

If you’re using charcoal, be prepared for the fact that it may well take a bit of practice to get the temperature just right. This depends on both the barbecue and the charcoal you’re using. A good rule of thumb, however, is that it takes quite a bit of charcoal to heat the steel up, so you may need 1.5–2 barbecue starters’ worth of charcoal to get the steel up to 250–300 degrees. The coals must have passed their peak heat before you place the pizza on The Pizza Steel, and you should ideally place the charcoal towards the outer edge of the barbecue to avoid the bottom heat getting too high whilst baking.

It typically takes 4–5 minutes to bake the pizza, but this naturally depends on the temperature.

Gas barbecue

It’s easier to control the temperature on a gas barbecue. As I don’t own a gas barbecue myself, I’ll hand over to Michael S. from Denmark, one of our customers who’s something of a barbecue expert.

He writes:

I left the barbecue (a Weber Q3000) on at full blast for 20 minutes.

I then turned off the barbecue’s middle burner and set the outer burner to the lowest heat setting when I wasn’t cooking. All the burners were turned off whilst I was baking pizza, and I baked four perfect pizzas. The barbecue maintained a temperature of 300 degrees without being switched on.

Each pizza took four minutes to bake.