My new favourite dish

Damian decided we needed a proper barbecue so we could best enjoy our newly reorganised space outside. After looking into the differences between gas and charcoal, we decided a charcoal model would probably work out best for us. We won’t have that many opportunities throughout the year as nice weather and weekends don’t often coincide in Yorkshire. We went for a Weber kettle drum, a classic design.

We noticed some rather nice accessories for the Weber barbecues, and we decided to get the pizza stone. It’s made from Danish blue granite, and it will be fine in our gas oven too.

Two nights ago, we fired up the barbecue, made some pizza dough and Damian crafted a pizza for us. It took a long time to cook, but that may have been down to the charcoal not burning evenly (I think we need to experiment with different types) but I have to say, it was worth the wait as it tasted phenomenal. It took me straight back to the open air restaurant in a Frascati piazza Dad took me and my sister to, where the pizzas were served straight from their outdoor wood fire ovens. It’s not just the smoky flavour to the dough, it somehow seems to accentuate the individual flavours in the topping too.

I can’t wait until the next time we have a warm evening to try it again.

Pizza barbecued on the pizza stone

It’s cheating a little bit posting this here as we haven’t grown any of these ingredients! We use organic stoneground bread flour to make our bread and dough, an organic tomato sauce, such as Seeds of Change (if we have no time to make our own), organic baby spinach, and Italian cherry tomatoes. We also dotted pieces of goat’s cheese on this one. We would normally use lashings of basil too, but they had sold out in town and we haven’t sown ours yet. We served with rocket.