I was able to get my hands on something that I’ve been wanting to try for a very long time.  The Kettle Pizza attachment unit for the 22″ Weber Kettle Grill!  As you may know, pizza on the grill is one of my favorite things to cook and I’ve written a few articles about it here on BBQ Revolution.  Our family loves to eat pizza and I really don’t think there is any better way to eat it.

First and foremost, if you like pizza, and particularly, wood fired or grilled pizza, you need to do yourself a favor and pick one of these up ASAP.  After running just a few ‘tests’ on this unit, I am convinced I could put my product against the best pizza joints in Omaha and there are some good ones here.  The final product is simliar to what you’d get for $13 (cheese only) - $20 (a few topppings) for a 14″ pizza at a fine wood fired pizza joint, only it tastes just as good if not better and it’s a fraction of the cost, with as many toppings as you’d like – PLUS – you’ll love it even more because YOU cooked it and know exactly what is in it!

If you can’t tell, I love this thing and I decided ‘why wait’ to tell you what I think until the end of the review.  Read on and get all the details about how it comes packages, assembly, recipes and how to cook on it – but you may want to go order one first at www.kettlepizza.com so it’s on the way.  When you finish reading this, you’ll want one immediately.

I couldn’t wait for the Kettle Pizza to arrive and when my wife told me it was at the door step, the first thing I wanted to do was to come home and try it out.  However, for the sake of this review, I thought I’d take some time to explain how it came in the package and assembly so you know what to expect and can be ‘locked and loaded’ the minute yours comes to your door.

Here’s the box it arrived in.  I felt like Ralphie in the Christmas Story with the Red Rider BB gun opening it. 

The contents looked nice and professional and were in perfect shape and included instructions, a wooden pizza peel, a stoneware pizza pan, a pizza stone, the stainless steel ring, a thermo, handles for the stainless ring and the hardware and a nice wooden rolling pin.  I kind of thought the rolling pin would take a back seat to my expensive kitchen aid rolling pin, but it RULES.  It’s nice and long and works much better than the kitchen aid in terms of the dough sticking.

To assemble, you don’t need any tools.  Simply attach the 2 stand off bolts to the stainless steel ring with the wingnuts inside the ring, and the same for the handles, just like the pic below.  The kettle lid will be resting on the top bolt, along with the two handles and provide good support.  The bottom bolt and handles will rest on the base of the kettle and also provides good support.  The bottom wingnuts, inside the ring, will be the support for the kettle grate that will hold the pizza stone.

Once you’ve attached both bolts and the two handles, attach the kettle pizza thermo the same way, right below the nifty ‘HOT” sign on the front of the unit.  Here’s the finished assembly….easy peasy.  Took me about 3 minutes, including picture time.

Remember, the wingnut on the inside of the ring is going to support the kettle grate.  Turn all of them horizontal, like the pic below and then set the grate inside and place the entire unit on top of the kettle base, like the other pic below.  You are almost ready!

Here’s a recipe and some pics for what we do in our house.  The crust recipe is the same for all pizzas and we put our favorite toppings on it.  Be creative and do what you like.

For the dough, you’ll need the following ingredients per pizza:

• 1 1/2 cups of all purpopse flour
• 3/4 cup of hot water
• 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar
• 1 tablespoon of active dry yeast

To make the dough:

• Put the hot water in a measuring cup, along with the sugar and yeast. 
• Mix with a spoon until it is all dissovled and let set for five minutes
• Put the flour in a large bowl and form a crater in the center
• Pour the hot water / sugar / yeast mixture into the crater and mix with a fork until all the flour and water is blended well
• Cover with a cloth and let set aside for about 5 hours, so the dough rises.

Here are a couple pics for the dough:

While that is resting, you can prep all the rest of your ingredients.  Here are just a few we used and the videos will show a few more.  Below you can see the cheese, ground chicken, pepperoni, sauce and green pepper.

Once the dough has rested for 5 or more hours, you’ll have to knead the dough so it is stretchy.  Using your fist, simply punch the dough down many times (over 25) and add flour along the way so it isn’t sticky.  It also makes it easier.

To roll out the dough, flour a large cutting board or smooth surface and use the wooden rolling pin that came with your unit, like so:

Next, take your pizza peel and cover it with corn meal so the dough will slide off easily when putting on the kettle and then transfer the dough to the peel and form your edge crust like so

Now you can top it with whatever you’d like!  Here is one of our pizzas pre-cook:

We’ll get to the setup and cook videos in just a minute, but first I wanted to point out a few things for prepping your kettle that I learned:

• Start with a fully lit chimney starter completely full of coal. 
• Place the lit coals at the back of the kettle, away from the opening.
• You must use real wood to get temps above 500.  I used a pecan / pear mix.
• You must make sure that the pizza stone is fully up to temp to avoid the dough sticking.  I use water drops to test if the stone is hot enough.  If water sizzles when you toss it on the stone and disappears quickly, you are all set.

Here you can see where I placed the coal and wood:

In this video, you can see all the steps I take to getting the kettle ready for a cook, which should tie everything together for you:

Finally, this next video will show you how amazing the Kettle Pizza is by demonstrating in a non-stop video, a full pizza being cooked in just over 4 minutes:

Here are a couple of our finished pizzas.  We had a New Year’s Eve party this year and churned out many of these and the entire thing was a hit!  From the cook itself (everyone had fun watching) to the eating (everyone LOVED the pizza).

The bottom line on this product:  BUY IT!  It works better than advertised and is the perfect home pizza making device.  Honestly, if I were to open a pizza restaurant, I’d love to have a way to run a whole bunch of these to turn out pizzas for the customers. 

It is amazing and worth every penny.

As always – let us know if you have any questions on how to run this unit @ info@bbqrevolution.com

As everybody knows, we swear by the Weber Kettle.  So, when we see something out there that may make it better we want to try it.  Ever skeptical in things that can make a perfect rig better we felt obligated to put it to the test.  If you started out like most of us you’ve done your time standing by the kettle feeding it a few briquettes every hour to run for long periods of time.  According to the claims on the website the Smokenator 1000 can run for 6 hours if ran per the instructions.

The design of the unit is quite simple and in fact, we’ve tried to mimmick it in round about ways by using foil pans or foil to block the direct heat from the charcoal.  This unit is simplicity at its finest and can be installed and removed very easily.  The one thing that excited me most was the water pan because we are currently in discussions about adding water in our competition rig.  I’d ran water in the past on my WSM and I don’t the specific reason why I quit doing so.  Now I’m pretty sure I’ll be running water during pre-season practices on our big cooker to see if it benefits the moisture and texture of the ribs as I feel it did with the Smokenator.

As you can see below, theres not much to it.  The picture is self explanatory with maybe an exception about  the little rod that comes with the kit.  Don’t lose it.  It’s a stir stick for the coals that I misplaced somewhere during the cook only for it to magically appear immediately upon completion of the run.  Good thing I’ve got a stick or two of welding rod in the garage.

As previously mentioned what caught my eye was the claims of a 6 hour cook time on one load of kingsford.  The first time I ran it I didn’t quite get 6 hours out of it, perhaps it was because it was just under 60 degrees out and raining through the entire cook.  Hey, why try these things out when it’s beautiful outside?  We’re a competition team, we like to know how things run in mediocre conditions.  However, I did get 4.5 hours out of it which is darn good!  Further tests had gotten me to the 6 hour mark they had claimed on the website.  Pretty impressive!

Installation is easy if your grates are in good shape, if they’re well used like ours you’ll need to take the charcoal grate out and get the concaved shape out of it.  Don’t just flip it over so it’s convex, the smokenator needs that bottom grate to be flat.  I simply took mine out, laid in on the ground and stepped on it.  There are a couple of tabs that rest against one of the bars on the grate and if it’s not flat it will not fit properly.  This is no discredit to the smokenator, just a helpful tip.

I had decided to cook my umpteenmillionth rack of ribs this year as the test.  I used the 3-2-1 method as usual and a variation of my competition recipe.  I decided not to sauce the ribs after I removed them from the foil so I could truly tell if the meat was any more moist than usual.  We’ve never run any type of additional moisture with our ribs in contests.  And even in my bullet I put sand in the water pan instead of water when practicing new rib recipes.  As you can see below at the very end of the cook the ribs were still moist and if you look closely, you’ll see there’s no water in the water pan at this point.  Which brings up a quick topic for discussion.  You will need to keep an eye on the water pan if you’re really looking to add moisture.  The water will boil and evaporate quickly.  Maybe next time I’ll put some apple juice in the pan instead…

The ribs turned out to be very moist with a great smoke flavor. 

Overall, I would recommend this unit if you are a Weber kettle owner.  It would be a perfect addition to those of you that own kettles and have never slow cooked on them.  I look forward to using it to cook a brisket or other large cut of meat.  If you’re into smoking turkeys take a look at their website, they’ve got a great looking method for doing so.  I definitely look forward to trying it this Thanksgiving. Perhaps it will bring me back to my roots a bit (without having to babysit the kettle so much). 

There is a ton of of additional information and photos at www.smokenator.com.  

Product Review: IQ 110

Manufacturer: PitmasterIQ.com

Description:
Automatic Temperature for Charcoal Smokers (Weber Kettle, Weber Smokey Mountain models, Big Green Egg Smokers, Drum Smokers, etc.). 

Our team discovered the impact automatic temperature control can do for your turn ins when we added Rock’s Stoker BBQ controller to our main rig last year.  Additionally, it gave us a chance to actually get some rest instead of monitoring our rig temp, fuel level, etc. This led us to consider adding a second stoker fan and adaptor kit for our Weber bullets.  In our search we stumbled upon the IQ110.  We were intrigued by the design, and reached out to John Kennington, owner of PitmasterIQ.com, for more product information. A few weeks later, we were sent a demo model to conduct a review, so here we go. 

Installation:  
When the unit arrived, it consisted of 5 parts: the control unit, air adapter, hose, temperature probe, and an AC adaptor.  A couple of koozies also found their way into the fed ex box, which was much appreciated.  We found the instructions to be straight forward and easy to follow. Just looking at the pieces, it was pretty obvious how to use it and set it up, but we did due diligence and went through the steps in the instructions. For our review, we used the Weber 22” Smokey Mountain cooker. We were running some trial briskets, so we had two long cooks coming up, which would be a perfect time to put the IQ to the test. We installed the IQ110 in about 2 minutes, no problems.

Operation: 
Operating the IQ110 is simple, you turn the dial to the desired temperature and the IQ takes care of the rest. There’s a LED light that will be doing one of the following:

• Flashing green – your pit is10 degrees cooler that the set point
• Solid green- the pit is within 10 degrees of the set point (desired result).
• Solid red- pit is 10 degrees or more over the set point
• Flashing red- pit is 50 degrees or more over the set point, not good.
• Alternating red/green: This happened to us a few times, and was due to us taking the lid off to mop the brisket. This is the unit detecting the lip being open, and the LED returned to normal within a few minutes.  However, if it would have stayed alternating red/green, it could mean the probe has failed or the main unit has overheated.

As you can read above, it is easy to set up the unit and have a decent idea of where your temp is by observing the LED light. If you can’t figure out how to do that, you probably shouldn’t be around fire and need to stop reading now. For the rest, I digress to the results.

As side benefit:  Even though there isn’t a current temperature gauge on the IQ – you can turn the dial until it turn’s solid green and get a real good idea of where the temp sits currently.  Quickly turn it back to your desired temp though!  The IQ reacts very well! The fan will kick off within a couple seconds if you move it to a temp where it thinks it needs to stoke the fire! 

Cook:  
We filled the charcoal chamber up and used 1 charcoal starter full of lit coal to start the cook, in addition to hickory chunks. The LED flashed green and the fan kicked in.  In 35 minutes, it was at our set point of 240, and the LED was a steady green. Our brisket was added.  For the next 8 hours the unit rarely went away from the steady green, and if it did, it recovered quickly. In both cooks, we found the product to work near perfect during the first 8 hours. The only issue we had was when we began mopping our brisket, and we took the lid off every 40 minutes or so for 5 hours. We did have a couple of times of flashing red and red LED indicators, for about 15 minutes an episode. It is important to note that the Weber 22” is a great cooker, but has the flaw of extreme temperature rises when the lid is off. We had better luck in our second cook when we closed the bottom intake vent and top vent ½ way. The issue we faced was related to the smoker, not the IQ. For the 18” Smokey Mountain, we would not foresee this issue. Also, if we weren’t mopping so often, it wouldn’t have surfaced.  

Turning to accuracy, the IQ’s temperature dial is segmented in 25 degree intervals, with space to set in between (see pic below). So you if you want 240, you need to use your best judgment where that is. To test the accuracy, we used the built in thermometer on the Weber as well as a 3^rd thermometer placed in one of the top vent hole as our gauge. Both thermometers and the IQ ran at the same temp, which was great to find out. We were left with the impression that the IQ temperature probe is very accurate. 

Final Thoughts: 

The IQ110 did what it said it would do.  It does not have the features of some of the fancier controllers out there, such as digital readouts, food probes, etc. It also does not have the hefty price tag that comes along with those. It’s a no frills temp controller that is a great match for bullets, kettles, Big Green Eggs, Drum smokers, and similar types of smokers.  What we found with the IQ110 was an easy installation, easy to operate, and most importantly, a very accurate temperature control for long periods of time.  As a competition BBQ team, the last thing you want to do is battle rig temperatures all night long.  When we cook on our bullets, we find them to be accurate, but still get up every few hours to check the temperature during the night and usually make an adjustment to the vents during those times. With the IQ110, I would be comfortable sleeping through the night. Many backyard bbq folks and competition folks use aforementioned cookers. With the smaller price tag, the IQ110 isn’t going to break the bank and should provide some comfort before you close your eyes for some sleep during your cook.  Here is a pic of the brisket we turned out using the IQ110.

Construction overview:

The first thing to do is buy 2 “food grade” drums. Be careful not to buy drums that were used for toxic materials or trash.  You need to burn these barrels for 6 hours minimum to sanitize them. I used all smoke wood when doing this. My neighbor had a ton of apple wood that worked quite well. You will also need to remove all the paint of the drum.

Next, we cut out the door and vents on the bottom. We hinged the door and used electrical box cover with locking washers for the vents.

Barrel is ready to paint.

The next step was paint. Use a high temp engine enamel, black is probably the way to go. However, being from husker country, I just had to have 1 of them be a husker smoker. Here, we apply the first coats of paint.

First coat of red paint is on. Looks like a Longhorn Burnt orange, but don't worry, it will dry to a more powerful Husker Red.

Still drying, but looking better.

After the paint dried, the fun began. I’ll spare you the step by step instructions, but in a nut shell, we added the casters, lined the inside of the barrel with fire brick (for insulation, efficiency) using bbq mortar, added the grates, the diffusion plate (a round piece of stainless steel with lots of holes. This sits right above the coals and prevents the flames from hitting the meat), added a stack, and finally a thermometer.

The last step would making the charcoal basket. My father in law Dan whipped up some awesome baskets.

Now that's a charcoal Basket!

 Here is a look at the smokers first action, cooking up some whole chickens.

The Husker N is added.

The bird is the word, in this case.

Barrel Smoker complete

 The pros of this smoker are the ease of use and most importantly, the efficiency. The fire bricks really make this thing very fuel friendly. It is a very similar to the big green egg in that regard.  It also responds very fast to adjustments to the vents, allowing for easy control of temperature. It cooks up some great chicken and ribs. We  brought it to a competition and turned in the ribs we made on it.  It can cook brisket and pork, but with only 1 shelf, that takes up all the space.

The cons are more abundant. The cost, when we finished, reach about $200 in materials. There were lots of little expenses like furnace gaskets, brackets, metal for the stack, diffusion plate, etc. The time was also a drawback. It just took too long to make a barrel smoker. These should be able to be constructed in a matter of a few hours, not a few days. It also requires welding, cutting, and fabrication, which can be frustrating. The other drawbacks are portability and space. It fits less than the Weber Smokey Mountain 18″ model. The fire brick and mortar make it close to 200 lbs when it is done. The casters help, but getting it to competitions or even through grassy areas is difficult.

Final thoughts: With a search you can find this plan on the internet. While the barrel does cook decent, I would gravitate toward a simpler, more portable design. After making this smoker, I can truly say I beleive I can build a more efficient, better cooking, more portable, and cheaper smoker from a drum.  In fact, I may do this in the fall and post the step by step instructions and results on here!