My Darling B made pizza for dinner last night. She wanted it cooked on the grill. Since I am the grillmaster, it fell to me to figure out how to cook a pizza on the grill. This is the story of my PIZZA FAIL.

Just to get this out of the way: Does anybody other than me think that cooking pizza on a grill, Weber or otherwise, is a little on the weird side of outdoor cooking? And I mean “weird” in the weirdest possible sense of the word. Whoever came up with the idea of cooking a pizza on a wire grill over a charcoal fire had to be in one of two frames of mind: Either he was making a pizza and wondering, “What’s the most outrageous way to cook this that I could talk other people into trying?” I’m not sure that this was the case, because just off the top of my head I can think of lots of ways to cook a pizza that sound way cooler and would be a lot less trouble than trying to cook it on a grill. Just for instance, flamethrowers leap to mind. Don’t think I could cook a pizza with a flamethrower? Let me have one for a week and I’ll get back to you.

Or, our pioneering chef was flipping burgers on his trusty Weber one Sunday afternoon and – I know this will sound blasphemous, but stay with me here – he was a little bored by doing the same old same old, so he asked himself, “What would be the most challenging food to cook on a grill?” And he began to visualize the scene: Throwing a big, doughy pie on a wire grill and expecting it to cook before it falls through onto a bed of red-hot coals. It’s nutso to expect that to work. An overachieving chef would therefore waste hours of his time on it to make it happen.

You read that right: When My Darling B proposed cooking a pizza on the grill, she said the way it’s done is to simply throw it on the wire grill. “And how exactly do you just throw a pizza on the grill?” I asked her, after my imagination completely failed to picture a way to slide a pie onto the grill without wrinkling it, folding it in half or spilling any or, even more likely, all the toppings through the grill onto the coals, where the fat from the pepperoni and cheese would erupt into a column of flame that would incinerate the dough. Which would look so cool, but would not achieve the result we were after.

She couldn’t imagine how it was done, either, so when she made the pie, she rolled it out on our pizza pan, a fourteen-inch circle of aluminum perforated as thoroughly as any road sign on a back road in hillbilly country. It always worked well in the oven, so we figured it would do the job well on the grill, too. Using the pan may have been my first mistake.

I wasn’t sure how hot the fire should be. B thought it should be at least as hot as the oven, 450 degrees, when we bake pizza in it. Trouble with that is, I don’t use a thermometer when I cook on the grill. I can build a fire that’s fairly cool, hot, pretty hot or very hot, but I have no idea what that translates to in degrees Fahrenheit. In the end, what I did was build a fire as hot as I could make it, then put the lid on it for a couple minutes to moderate it a bit. Not knowing how hot it really was may have been my second mistake.

I slid the pizza on its pan onto the grill, put the cover on and set a timer for three minutes, then paced back and forth impatiently waiting for it to go bleepity-bleep-bleep. Three minutes later the pizza looked pretty good: Nothing in flames, nothing burned at all, and the cheese was melting nicely, so I put the cover back on and ran the timer another three minutes.

When the timer bleeped and I could yank the cover off again everything still looked fine. I even hooked a fingernail under the edge of the crust and lifted it to make sure I wasn’t burning it. No worries there. The toppings, though, were not quite as bubbly as I wanted them, so I put the cover back on and planned to check again in another minute. Leaving it in that extra minute was my third and final mistake.

I ran inside to get the thick pot holder and, by the time I came back out, so much smoke was chugging out of the top vent of the Weber that it looked like a steam engine laboring up a hill with a long string of freight cars behind it. I snatched the pizza off the grill as quickly as I could, but I was a minute too late: The damage had already been done.

What happened, I think, was this: In that final minute, the fire heated the pan as hot as it was going to get: Not red-hot, but so close as to make no difference. I probably could have taken the pizza off two minutes earlier and the pan would have kept on cooking the crust for another three more minutes until it was toasty-crunchy instead of burned. The toppings might’ve been a little gooey, but the crust wouldn’t have gone all Cajun style on us. We managed to prise almost six slices off the pan and scrape off enough of the blackened stuff in the center to make it edible. Around the edges, the crust was almost normal.

Thinking it over later, maybe B’s original idea of just throwing it on the grill would be better. The pan, after all, is what burned the pizza, not the fire, and it kept me from seeing that the center of the crust was getting burned. How are we going to get the pizza from the kitchen to the fire, though, and slide it onto the grill? That’s the million-dollar question.