If someone wants to try this on their Performer or 22.5” Kettle, here’s how I cook them similarly with great results, will do my best to describe. I’ve done some searching to try and find my old thread with pictures but couldn’t locate it;
Charcoal grate goes in normal position
Line lump charcoal in a big ring on the outside of the charcoal grate (stacked close to wall as possible)
Cooking grate in standard position
Borrow charcoal ring from 18” WSM and place in center of cooking grate
Place pizza screen or holed cooking pan on top of charcoal ring
All vents wide open and light lump
Preheat all of this (lid on) until it’s screaming hot, offset lid if needed
Lift lid and place prepared pizza on screen or cooking pan
Lid back on, all vents still wide open
Cook to desired done-ness, close top vent to 1/2 or 3/4 at tail end of cook if you need to cook the top a little quicker
Remove and eat
I’ve had great results with this using the raw prepared dough from Publix. I never made my own dough. I would also cook frozen pizzas like this in an effort to church them up a bit when in a pinch.
Important things here are to make sure you put enough lump charcoal, keeping it on the outer ring of the charcoal grate so it’s not under the pie, and getting it preheated properly. You should be pegging the thermometer in the Performer before the pie goes on, which will then choke the temperature down (why preheat is critical).
The charcoal ring elevates the pizza to the top of the lid, you can usually see how well the top is cooking by looking in the lid holes with a flashlight, so no lid lifting necessary if possible. Normally pie would wrap up in under 8-10 minutes.
I first tried variations of this with a pizza stone with less than desirable results. One day I saw a thin, holed pizza cooking pan in the bakeware section at the local grocer, I never looked back.
If you have a 22” kettle or Performer, and a 18” WSM you have everything you need except the cheap cooking pan. Could probably sub the 18” charcoal ring for anything else to lift the screen/cooking pan up. If I had some pieces of wood the same height I’d give it a go.
