Pizza On The Rocks

You gotta try stuff. The pictures go back 11 years (2006) to a project that I had all but forgotten about. It's not that it didn't work - in fact, it worked well. But like so many kitchen experiments the energy put in isn't always worth it.

A bag of River Rocks purchased at Home Depot were washed and placed in a 15-inch pizza pan

The pan and its rocks were heated to 500 degrees for an hour

I then built up a standard pizza on my pizza peel. Attention pizza snobs - that cardboard peel was created in 1995 and was in use for 11 years when this picture was taken. 11 more years have passed and it's still in use. At about 25 pizzas/year that peel has seen 500+ pizzas on it!

I slid the pizza onto the rocks. I don't remember how long it was on there but my guess is 6 or 7 minutes.

The 'za is looking pretty good. How does the bottom look?

Interesting, eh?

So here's the problem with all this. I was hoping for something special. You know, you try something different and see what happens. What happened in the case was that the pizza tasted exactly the same as if I cooked it on my standard pizza stone. OK, that's not bad, so why not keep doing it this way if only as a novelty? The problem was smoke. After each use a little cornmeal and maybe even a little cheese would fall onto the rocks. With no way to get it out short of a complete cleaning of the stones each session resulted in more "Crud on the rocks." Pleasant pizza aromas were displaced by a smell like something was burning - which it was! And so ended the great "Pizza on the Rocks, 2006" adventure.