What is he up to now? The stack of stainless steel rings on the tailgate does arouse the curiosity.
In our house we have a weekly ritual that is known as, “Pizza Night”. It doesn’t matter where we are or what we’re doing, if we’re not already talking about getting pizza on Monday night, we are reminded by our favorite pizza fan what day it is. Over the years we’ve taken this love of pizza into the woods with us and had lots of fun with it.
Vegan and delicious 
Pepperoni is always a favorite
One of the great things about pizza is the unlimited variety of options. Dietary restrictions? No problem. In addition to the traditional blend of flour, water, yeast, sugar, salt, and olive oil; there’s gluten free crusts, cauliflower crusts, sourdough crusts, and that’s not even considering commercially prepared ready to cook options. As to toppings, one can go traditional with sauce, cheese, and favorites or just as easily go completely plant based, full on carnivore, or even, (shudder), top with fruit. The only limitation is one’s creativity.
What we have found to be most effective, is to bring dough to camp ready to work. Now that can mean a dough recipe that has been pre-mixed at home and ready to be shaped or a pre-made pizza crust. To some that means the refrigerator case style pizzas or even a tube of crescent rolls. There are lots of ways to do it since the bottom line is we need a crust, some sauce, cheese in most cases, and toppings of one’s choice. Yes, we’ve even grabbed a frozen pizza on the way out of town and baked it at camp.
Pizzas require a hot oven for cooking but they don’t take very long at all when in that oven. top heat is more important than bottom heat and the Dutch oven works great for that.
The problem with cooking pizza in a cast iron pot is getting a flimsy sheet of raw dough covered with toppings into a 4 inch deep pot without a disaster. While the crust is firm and stronger when done, taking it out of that same pot also creates challenges. At home, all of our pizzas are cooked on flat surfaces for good reason and duplicating that in the woods is the challenge.
There are some schools of thought that suggest setting a lid inverted on a stand and using that as the base and putting the Dutch oven, upside down, over the lid. That way when the oven is removed the pizza is on a flat surface ready to slide off quickly onto a cutting board. I’ve done that, and have found that removing an upside down, hot oven, covered with coals, (with no lip to hold the coals in place like a lid offers), with just gloved hands is a trick that needs to be done both quickly and with great care.
Some cooks use parchment paper, extra long in length, simply cook the pizza in the Dutch oven as normal and use the parchment paper as a tool to quickly lift the finished pizza out of the pot. I’ve only dropped a few this way.
Everyone gets to choose a topping of their own. 
Pizza rings have simplified our kitchen. 
Time for the best part, eating. 
He loves his pizza ring… 
… and his pepperoni pizza
Still yet another way for campfire pizzas is to adapt Dutch oven style cooking but instead of using the pot, using a pizza cooking ring adapter with two Dutch oven lids. One lid is inverted and set on a stand over coals as previously described, a steel ring much like the sides of a springform pan sits on top of the inverted lid and a second lid is placed on top of the ring for the top heat. This provides the best of all worlds, in our experience, in that not only can you remove that top heat with a lid lifter, the ring is easy to remove with gloved hands and your completed pizza is on a flat surface easy to slide off with a peel or spatula.
Several years ago, as a gift for my son, we purchased a pizza ring kit from a Dutch oven pro, Robert Murphy, known as “Mr. Dutch Oven”. We’ve loved it and use it a bunch. Many times I cook for large groups or like to have multiple pizzas cooking so I wanted to add to our ring inventory, and had a larger size than what was listed on his website in mind. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to contact the folks where we got our first ring kit, I approached a friend of mine who can fix or make anything in the world.
When I say fix or make anything, that’s not an exaggeration. His machine shop business, in addition to all kinds of engine work that I don’t understand, makes parts for Model T’s and for projects that that have been sent into outer space. Whether it’s a woodworking project, metal fabrication or when I suffered the heartbreak of dropping a family heirloom, cast iron, Dutch oven lid on the floor, only to pick up the pieces, my friend John was able to fix it.
John and his bride Julie, are longtime family and Church friends who have five daughters, each two years apart. Back in the spring, one was raising funds to go on a youth group trip and I suggested there might be something he could build as an income generator to help support some of his kid’s youth ministry activities. I told him that I wanted a larger pizza ring and that I wasn’t able to get one through the place where I bought my original and asked if he could fix one for me.
I showed him my pizza ring and suggested he could go into production on a micro scale as a small source of side income for the various fund raising projects that his children find themselves supporting. He took some measurements and put together 3 different sizes for the different lid configurations I use; 12”, 14”, and 16”.
Our Halloween treat was that the rings were ready and in addition to a few for our kitchen, he made a small run of the stainless steel pizza rings to be sold as a fundraiser for summer camp scholarships or other youth ministry related charities.
We have several of the 12 inch variety that will work perfectly with a pair of 12-inch Dutch oven lids for family size campsite pizza parties as well as a few 14’s and 16’s.
My original source had both a ring and a lid stand as part of the package sold and that’s worked great for us. I found, for my purposes though, that the stand was redundant as I had plenty of lid stands already. His price including shipping for a 12 inch ring and stand is $50 which I think is a fair price. That said, I have no interest in shipping at this time nor do I plan on including a lid stand, so we’re pricing this limited, first run of these stainless steel 12 inch rings at $30 delivered to campsites where we do demos or Dutch oven gatherings. Those interested, can shoot me a message at UncleMikesOutdoorKitchen@gmail.com, @UncleMikesOutdoorKitchen on Instagram, or on our Facebook page and we can discuss details for delivery, or for those interested, pricing on the larger rings. Again, for this first run, all revenue from these will go to John’s girl’s for their choice of youth ministry camp scholarship or charity.
We’ll have some more pizza fun in a future post showing these new stainless steel assorted sized rings in action to add to our pizza memory gallery along with some of our favorite crusts and toppings experiments.
