Grilling at Work II: LBE Maximus

Last week we had another get-together after work for our co-workers, spouses and a few invited guests. Once again we attempted to push the envelope with what is possible to do with a couple of low-cost gas grills and a skeleton kitchen.

This time, I brought out the big guns. I lugged my Little Brown Egg from home to work and tripled it's capacity to suit the crowd.

This was accomplished by outfitting the LBE with a rib and potato rack from my local hardware megastore. This $8 device is perfect for holding 3 whole (butterflied) chickens upright inside my little smoker. It worked beautifully, smoking all three birds to hickory perfection.

Now that I have chickens down pat, I want to experiment with more challenging BBQ fare. Perhaps I can develop a low-fat homemade sausage for smoking. We'll see...

I also tried something a little new. Knowing that grills can get MUCH hotter than my oven at home, I decided to try and make some pizza under the hood. My first pizza was cooked on a stone on the main grate, and it ended up like an Apollo heat shield on the bottom. Using the pizza pan on the warming grate under full heat had the best results. Once you get the timing down, you can churn out pizzas every 10 minutes or so. The flank steak is just a bonus.

I made 3 different kinds of pizza, but the one that flew off the grill the fastest was a white pizza, made with Alfredo sauce, tons of roasted garlic (mashed into a paste and spread in with the sauce) and six-cheese shredded blend. I'm a student of the "less is more" school of pizza construction, so I generally don't load the pie down with sauce and toppings. By controlling the load on the crust you reduce the risk of dreaded soggy pizza and you make the whole thing a lot lighter.

Thanks to Shane Byler for taking the pictures while I was cooking.