Failure. Even if my family didn’t see it that way.

Not dignifying this with a photo, either. Well, ok, here is a shot from above. 

I burned the pizza last night. Both pies. 

In my defence (not that it helped much at the time and the failure does still sting, a little) I was cooking them over a charcoal fire in a thin metal kettle barbecue. It’s all we have here at the lake. I do have a pizza stone, though. We aren’t savages.

My technique is pretty crude: light a bunch of coals in the kettle, get them going really well, drop in the pizza stone, wait half an hour or so and then cook the pizza. 

This time I used lump charcoal, rather than briquettes. Man, that stuff burns hot. Like really hot. Like hotter than I expected. Ergo, the first pizza, as I was trying to get some heat on top (which, in retrospect, was just not going to happen in a contraption like that) burned rather badly. It was still really tasty, just, as my mother would say, “Crispy”. 

The second pizza was better, but the same thing happened again – a moment of inattention and it was black. Talk about a testament to the triumph of hope over experience. That annoying “Fool me once, won’t get fooled again” quote would also suffice. 

There is only one solution; try again. I’m getting better with barbecue pizza, but there is work yet to be done. 

On a positive note the customers weren’t too fussed. They ate it and didn’t give me a hard time. It’s nice when family is like that. In fact, they told me to stop beating myself up – that they enjoyed it and I should move on.

My wife brought up this post I showed her a while back. Apt.