Greetings, everybody, and welcome back to Cépage et Cuisine, Mary’s and Brian’s wine and food blog. This post started out as a brief wine of the week article, but morphed into a review of our newest food gadget, so I’m going to include both. Our new toy is a pizza stone that is designed for the grill, “turning your grill into a pizza oven,” according to Sur la Table, and I must say…we love it! Mary makes our pizzas from scratch, including the crust, which is all whole grain and sugar free. We blogged about that several months ago, which we invite you to read, so I won’t go into detail about it here. We also learned a few years ago that the secret to a great crust and great homemade pizza in the oven is a pizza stone. We have a couple of them that we have put to good use over the years. Without the stone, the crust often just has a cardboard texture.
Our new stone is glazed for use in the oven or on the grill, is dishwasher safe, and you can use pizza cutters or knives right on the stone. We have experimented with cooking crusts right on the grill rack, which turns out okay, but is a little tricky and easy to overcook. It’s almost impossible to cook full size pizza crusts directly on the rack. With a stone, however, you can prepare your pizza, slide it onto the preheated stone on the grill, get great grill flavor, that delightful char around the edges, fantastic crust, and include whatever toppings you desire.
Start your grill with the stone on the rack and heat it at maximum heat for between 10 and 15 minutes. Slide the pizza onto the stone, keep the heat pretty high, then cook for only about 12 minutes for a perfect pie. Mary’s going to talk a little about something different she did to make the crust her best ever:
I’ve watched pizzas being made in pizza parlors, and could never get the hang of putting the raw dough into the oven, so I’ve always pre-cooked my plain pizza crust just a little before putting on the toppings. The pizzas usually turn out fine, but this time we decided to experiment with putting the toppings on the uncooked dough and then sliding the whole thing onto the hot stone. I used a wooden pizza peel to move the pizza from the kitchen to the grill. I dusted the peel generously with cornmeal, then dusted the bottom of the dough with flour, just to make sure it would slide off onto the stone. Still, we had a little trouble getting the pizza to transfer onto the grill. We used a spatula to loosen the edges, and finally the whole thing slid off!
It turned out great! The crust was crunchy, kept its shape so it was easy to hold, yet had a soft doughy texture on top. I think we’ll cook the crust this way from now on, whether in the oven or on the grill.
Brian carried the stone with pizza into the kitchen and put it on the stovetop. It is very hot so be careful! You can see in this photo that he’s using a sharp pizza cutter right on the stone. It doesn’t leave a mark at all. Here’s Brian to talk about the wine.
This wine is a blend of Syrah and Petite Sirah from Preston of Dry Creek. Unlike many modern California producers, Lou Preston produces wines that aren’t overripe and over alcoholic, retain balance, and offer complexity. It is a full-bodied wine with loads of fruit, to be sure, but it had that great meaty/gamy character that I enjoy so much in a Syrah-based wine and the structural intensity that comes from Petite Sirah. He calls the blend Syrah-Sirah, an expression of the slightly different spellings of the two grapes. We really enjoyed this wine with the pizza. Here are my notes.
Preston Vineyards Syrah-Sirah Dry Creek Valley 2005. For a change, this was a really nice Syrah blend from California, not overripe or unbalanced. The nose shows a wonderful, complex, meaty, gamy quality that I like in a Syrah, similar to a Northern Rhone Valley expression. The palate was New World in style, appropriately so, with a soft texture and low acidity, but it was balanced and had nice fruit, smoky elements, pepper, and savory notes. I would describe it as moderately complex with a medium finish, a very decent wine that paired well with dinner. 55% Syrah, 45% Petite Sirah, 13.9% alcohol, a nice change from the Alice-in-Wonderland alcohols of many wines nowadays. We paid $28 for this wine at the winery on one of our wine trips.
There you have it folks, a terrific casual dinner with nice wine to sink your teeth into. We’re really enjoying the grill stone. I’m thinking of getting another or two to use as gifts for other people who love both homemade pizza and cooking on the grill. We got the stone from Sur la Table (http://www.surlatable.com/) for $49.95 plus shipping.
That’s our post for today. We hope you enjoyed it. Mary and I are departing soon for a couple of weeks of wine and food travel and hope to post frequently. Check back often here at Cépage et Cuisine, especially over the next couple of weeks or so. In the meantime,
Cheers!
Mary♥Brian
P.S. To our Georgia readers and anybody else across the Southeast who was affected by the tragedy of the tornadoes, you are in our thoughts and prayers every day.
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