Heating up a frozen pizza does not qualify as “cooking” for some people, but we’ve been experiencing with both homemade pizzas and store-bought frozen pizzas as a quick after-church Sunday lunch for a few months. Results have been good, so I’ll document and share what we’ve been doing and like the best now.
Costco has an excellent (Kirkland brand) cauliflower crust supreme pizza, which comes in a 2 pack.
On my RecTeq RT-700 pellet smoker with the GMG pizza stone insert attachment, I let it preheat for 30 minutes at 375°. RecTeq does not currently make this kind of pizza stone attachment, but the GMG version fits perfectly on my RT-700 and works great!
It’s awesome to be able to do start the grill preheating remotely using my iPhone app, just as we’re leaving church. Then cooking the pizza for six minutes right when we get home is about perfect. If I let the stone and smoker preheat even longer and the stone gets hotter I think it’s better, so a 45 minute preheat is probably preferred.
I’d like to see an analysis of how good this Costco cauliflower crust pizza is for our a “Optavia 5 & 1” diet plan, which minimizes carbs. It’s a turns out really crispy, and I add just some crushed red pepper and ground Parmesan cheese.
A GMG (or other brand) pizza peel is essential to get the pizza on and off the smoker / cooking stone quickly, and I also like sprinkling some semolina flour on the peel before using it.
The semolina flour acts like miniature ball bearings, making the pizza slide smoothly on and off the heated stone.
When we are cooking our own pizzas with a different prepared dough, I like using the “Caulipower” pizza crusts, which also come frozen in a box, in two packs. I can get these at Walmart Neighborhood Market, our Walmart Supercenter, or Costco.
I like to spread a thin layer of Rao’s pizza sauce, and then add pepperonis, chopped peppers, chopped black olives, or sometimes ham and pineapple chunks. But from ease and speed of cooking standpoints, the Costco cauliflower supreme pizza is really pretty awesome!
I know dedicated pizza ovens can get a lot hotter, like up to 950°, and cook pizzas in something like 60 seconds. I could experiment with higher temperatures in our stone, I can crank my grill up to 500° or 550°, but that would take longer to preheat and I’m not sure if the results are better. So since I found the 375° preheated for 30 minutes, cooked for six minutes works well, it’s what I have stuck with now for a while.
Are you cooking backyard pizzas on a pizza stone using a smoker or dedicated pizza oven? If you have any tips I’d love to hear them. I need to watch some more videos on YouTube about this, and probably make my own sometime soon.