Experience Pizza Project

Up in Seattle there is a museum called the Experience Music Project. If you are ever in the area I highly recommend you take some time and visit it, if for no other reason than it is co-located with the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame.

By now you are wondering what the heck this has to do with pizza. Nothing, other than the Experience part. As Oscar Wilde once said “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” Tonight we ate them.

We started off by deciding to do something a bit different. Instead of the normal tomato-based sauce we decided to use some of this:

And since no one in their right mind (not that we are accused of that often) mixes cheese with green curry sauce a decision was made to have cheese-less pizzas. The dough for both pizzas was TJ’s herb dough, and the first pizza was topped with chopped pork chops (leftover from the weekend) and pineapple.

Bubba Ho-Keg was configured a bit different tonight (more experimentation) and had a pizza stone setting directly on the grill while the pizzas were prepared directly on metal pans leftover from the days of Weber Kettle pizza experiments. Just for grins I left the vents wide open (another variable changed) and the temps were in the 600-650°F range when the first pizza went on. 8 minutes later I was scrambling to get it off; here’s a picture of it after being removed as I didn’t dare leave it on the grill any longer.

As you can see, the edges were crispy to and slightly charred in places. Fortunately it wasn’t a complete loss; we carved it up and it disappeared pretty quick. Except for the edges of the crust, which ended up on my plate somehow. The taste was a bit disappointing; the curry sauce wasn’t very pronounced but the pork and pineapple were very good. Overall rating: meh.

Mark Twain once said “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” Not dissuaded by the first pizza, off I went with cat tail in hand. Now the keg was really cooking.

On went pizza number two, topped with the remainder of the prime rib roast, some fresh basil, and a handful of sliced mushrooms. Keeping in mind that 8 minutes (the total time the first pizza was on the grill) was too long, I set the timer for 5 minutes. This is what I returned to when the timer expired.

This pizza wasn’t a total disaster, but darn close. Once it was scraped loose from the pan and the outer crust removed it actually tasted halfway decent. The crust was better than the FauxBurgers cooked on the CrockaQue but apparently not by much: the dog ate them but only after sniffing them rather suspiciously for a couple of minutes.

So what did we learn tonight? Perhaps that changing multiple variables can really fark up a cook? Or that green curry simmering sauce makes a crappy pizza sauce? Or that those really high temperatures in Bubba Ho-Keg might not be the best thing for pizza? Whatever it was, we’re not likely to make the exact same mistakes again in the future as we try hard to not conform to Einstein’s definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results).

And since we’ve been quoting famous figures throughout this post, we’ll leave you with this parting thought from Douglas Adams:

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Now go out there and swing a cat by the tail. Figuratively speaking, of course…

Tagged as: beef, bubba keg, carbs, indirect, pizza, pork, veggies