I’m all about cooking great food when I’m overlanding. I mean, why eat MREs when I can make things like homemade pizza while I’m on the road?
As you might know, I recently got a Camp Chef Woodwind WiFi 24 with Sidekick Sear for my backyard. I did the first cook on it just a few days ago, and it left me totally impressed with how easy it is to use the grill.
Now, obviously, the Woodwind WiFi 24 is too big to take overlanding, which is why I ordered a Camp Chef Pro60X – it’s small, lightweight, and offers supreme utility for overlanding cooking.
The best part is that I can mix and match accessories between my Woodwind WiFi 24 and the Pro60X, which is a major reason why I decided to upgrade to Camp Chef products. More so than their competitors, Camp Chef seems to have a larger ecosystem of products that can be used in the backyard or the backcountry, one of which is the Camp Chef 14-inch Artisan Outdoor Pizza Oven. So, yeah, homemade pizza in the backcountry? Bring it on!
How the Artisan Outdoor Pizza Oven Works
As you can see above, the pizza oven simply sits on the Sidekick Sear on the Woodwind WiFi 24 grill. While the grill uses pellets, the sidekick sear uses propane, thus, the pizza oven also uses propane.
The oven was designed after traditional wood-fired brick ovens, but uses a double-wall stainless dome to enhance the oven’s heating dynamics. There’s also a ceramic stone inside that pulls the moisture out of the dough and helps give it a nice, crispy crust – just what homemade pizza should have!
The oven also has a built-in temperature gauge so you can perfect the bake of your pizza (or other foods like meat, vegetables, bread, or even desserts).
The oven is 14 x 16 x 8 inches and fits most 14-inch Camp Chef cooking systems. At 21 pounds it isn’t exactly lightweight, but it’s a hell of a lot lighter than a brick pizza oven!
Making Homemade Pizza for the First Time
The inaugural usage of the pizza oven occurred in my backyard – unfortunately, my last overlanding trip was taken before I got my Pro60X. But cooking at home meant that my son could help me out and we could get some pizza-making experience under our belts before trying it out in the wilderness.
We planned to make our own dough, but ended up buying pre-packaged pizza crust.
With my son helping me out, we made a homemade pizza that was half bacon and pineapple and half bacon, pineapple, and basil.
Making the pizza was easy enough. We added tomato sauce to the premade crust, then sprinkled an entire bag of mozzarella cheese on top. We then added the pineapple to the entire pizza, basil to one half, and then sprinkled chopped bacon bits (which we cooked beforehand) on the entire pizza. For our first time making our own pizza, I think it looked pretty good!
Then it was time to cook up this bad boy.
Cooking the pizza in the pizza oven was as simple as putting the pizza together.
I preheated the pizza oven to 425 degrees. The pizza stone was right at 490 degrees. I would highly recommend investing in an infrared temperature gun (in addition to the built-in temperature gauge on the oven), that way you get a more precise temperature reading that can inform your cooking time.
Once I got the pizza in the oven, I let it cook for about 10 minutes. Again, I don’t think it turned out too badly!
Making Homemade Pizza on the Road
The ease with which I was able to make the pizza and cook it in the Camp Chef Artisan Outdoor Pizza Oven has convinced me that this will be a slam dunk for making dinners while I’m overlanding.
Seriously – it was a few minutes of prep time, during which the oven preheated, so it was ready to rock when I had the prep work done. Just a few minutes in the oven and it was ready to eat. I’d say 20 minutes of work for a tasty dinner isn’t bad at all!
Like I said earlier, I’ll take the pizza oven with me on my overlanding trips and use it on the Pro60X from Camp Chef. My plan is to try different types and flavors of pizza depending on where I’m at. It should be a fun exercise in overland cooking, so stay tuned for more easy homemade pizza recipes that you can try on your own overlanding adventures.