[Photograph: Adam Kuban]

I have linked the hecks out of this post since we debuted it just before Memorial Day. Forgive me, then, if I have pizza-paddled you over the head with it. But ... this is the internet, and newbies are constantly streaming in.

If you are one of them and want to know how to grill pizza, our step-by-step guide will help. It's easier than you think.

Now, go make some grilled pizza, y'all! »

According to our handy site-metering utility, the top 10 most popular items across the Serious Eats family of sites this week were ...

1. The Food Lab: Do 'Better' Eggs Really Taste Better? »
2. Battle for the Seas: McDonald's Filet-O-Fish vs. Wendy's Fish Fillet »
3. Cakespy: Birthday Cake French Toast »
4. A Trader Joe's Disappointment »
5. What to Eat at the US Open »
6. Rossopomodoro Pizza at Eataly »
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Grub Street San Francisco has a great slideshow of Anthony Mangieri's new pizzeria. It's very stark. Very. Copious pics of the, yes, Stefano Ferrara oven, too. [via @caseyspizza]

The Wise Old Pizza Owl wonders HOO knows their slice from shinola. [Photograph: Adam Kuban]

This week's pizza quiz is a little more general-knowledge for y'all. And it's short (only 5 questions). I don't want to work you too hard before you head off for Labor Day weekend.

Test your grease-addled brains here, folks! »

The Kettle Pizza grill insert promises to help you turn your 22-inch Weber kettle grill into a fire-breathing pizza-cooking machine.

Why would you even need this thing and what does it do? Those seemed to be the questions everyone at the test-grilling last night had. Even though Mmmph beat us to the punch on testing his, we wanted to try it the way the manufacturer intended it before maxing out the heat the way Mmmph did.

OK. There are a couple schools of thought on cooking pizza on the grill. One is to simply grill the dough directly on the grate. We deal with grilled pizza here, and in fact it's our preferred method anytime the words "grill" and "pizza" wind up in the same sentence.

But whenever we mention grilled pizza on Slice, a fair amount of people drop by and say that they like to use a pizza stone on their grills. The issue we've always found with that method is, well, let me poke Kenji here and see if he'll drop some science on us ...

The Heat Is On

Frequent Slice readers may know this already, but for those who don't, a Neapolitan pizza cooks via two modes of heat transfer: The bottom of the pizza is cooked by conduction, the direct transfer of energy from the stone to the crust. The top of the pizza is cooked via convection, the transfer of energy via hot air.

Conduction is a much more efficient method of heat transfer, which is why in a professional oven, to cook a pizza properly, the base of the oven need only be around 750°F or so, while the air above must be significantly hotter—in the 1,000°F to 1,200°F range.

The problem with trying to cook a pizza on a stone in a regular kettle grill is that, as many people have pointed out, the stone gets really hot, and it's hard to get the air temp above the pizza hot enough to match it. The bottom of the pizza burns before the top takes on any color. You might think that raising the lid higher and adding an opening would have the opposite of the desired effect, lowering the temperature inside the oven and making the top cook even less efficiently, but this is not the case. The important thing to remember is that moving air cooks a lot more efficiently than still air (think: convection mode in an oven vs. standard mode. The only difference is a fan circulating the air).

So really, the goal when cooking a pizza on the grill should be to get as much hot air circulating over the top surface of the pizza as fast as possible.

The main advantage that I see to using the Kettle Pizza insert is that when you get the fire and positioning of the stone right, it creates good convection currents. With the coals banked in the back, hot air rises off the coals toward the domed lid, then gets pulled back down and out the oven door opening. This moving air cooks the top of the pizza a lot faster than the relatively still air inside a completely sealed kettle.

The trouble we had was getting the temperature hot enough—we went through nearly 30 pounds of coal before we hit a sweet spot—but once we were there, the grill maintained its temperature at well over 700°F for a good 45 minutes (with a stone temperature of around 550°F). At about 3 to 4 minutes per pie, that was long enough to crank out 8 pies in rapid succession and feed an equal number of hungry guests. After the pizzas were done, the coals were still hot enough to fire up an addtional 8 Chili Cheeseburgers and a couple of red-chile marinated skirt steaks. —Kenji

Thanks, Kenji! That makes perfect sense. Now, the low-down on how this thing worked ...

For more observations, check out the slideshow »

The Verdict

Our initial 1.5 chimneys weren't cutting it, so we added 1.5 to 2 chimneys more.

As Kenji said, this thing does appear to give some added benefit to your pizza cooking but does so at the cost of an enormous amount of fuel. It is sometimes a chore to keep the thing stoked. Our advice is to start with 3 to 3.5 chimneys' worth of charcoal if you want to achieve the temperatures this thing needs to work.

This is the amount of coal we ended up using when we found our "sweet spot."

It's also imperative that you use the two-zone indirect fire that the manufacturer recommends. This ensures that you do not overheat the stone and cook the bottom of the pizza too quickly. (We tried an all-over coal placement and found that pizza bottoms cooked too fast that way.)

We also recommend cooking on a stone rather than a pan. Using the pan, we also found that the pizza bottom cooked too fast.

Do we recommend it? At $80 (about $105 after S&H) it is not the most expensive pizza-cooking gadget we've come across. My inclination would be as it always is -- just grill the pizza right on the grate.

But if you are looking for a Neapolitan-type crust and want a moderate edge over what a home oven can do for you, this might not be a bad option — as long as you understand its limitations and how to compensate for them.

Next up ... we want to get our hands on a Pizza Forge.

For more observations, check out the slideshow »

Rosario's Pizza is the type of place I want to love, but even if I don't, I tend to cut some slack because it is such a genuine piece of Americana. Or Italian-Americana, as the case may be. This little pizzeria on the side of a busy New Jersey road has been around since 1973. I was powerless to not pull into the parking lot of the ramshackle structure that looks something like the office of a mini golf course. A large A-frame roof, there only for effect, sits atop the front dining room. The building is painted green and trimmed with red. Out front are stone tables with circular benches wrapping around them, such as you might see in the backyards of one of those gaudy houses in mob films.

I couldn't help but stop when I saw Rosario's.

Inside, Formica tables and faux wood paneling complete the scene. In the back and off to the right a large counter divides the ovens and prep area from the dining room. The menu is a full-blown Italian-American affair: pastas and hot sandwiches (pizza burgers anyone?) The shop is close enough to Philadelphia to refer to its cold sandwiches as "hoagies" and its cheesesteaks simply as that, rather than prefixing them with "Philly." But the pizza is most similar to a classic New York slice.

Sal has owned Rosario's since 1972. When I asked why he never changed the name to "Sal's" he replies, in a thick Italian accent, that Rosario was his father.

A slice costs $1.75 but is on the smaller side when compared to a typical New York slice, being closer dimensionally to the slice I enjoyed so much recently from Pizzaland. I had hoped that the pizza at Rosario's would be as unique an expression of the art as the pies served at Pizzaland, but Rosario's are more middling than that, although still enjoyable. And the ambiance and heritage of the place add to the mood.

On a positive note the sauce and dough are all made fresh in-house. The slices I tried were on the soft, floppy side. Tip sag was significant, and the dough did not have much in the way of crunch.

Not that it was underdone. The dough had plenty of life — it was airy and pliant throughout, and the dimple left from a finger poke would reinflate almost as quickly as it sagged. You will want to order your pies or slices well-done here to achieve a significant textural contrast. Truth be told, there was not much flavor in the crust, and the cheese was also rather innocuous, leaving the sweet salty sauce to dominate the palate.

But there is still something alluring about the slice, as soft and mild as it is. There is an authenticity about it. And plenty of nostalgia within its delicate cheesy folds.

While I wouldn't consider Rosario's a pizza destination, it serves an honest, serviceable pie with a slice of Americana as a side. You might be disappointed if you go out of your way to try the pizza there, but if you happen upon it as I did, it will it will offer you an enjoyable slice.

This post will not make me popular. Is DiFara's transcendent or merely epiphanic? As a professional food critic, I can report only on food I have eaten. I have visited DiFara's just twice, once two years ago and again about ten months ago—both times mid-week and mid-afternoon. And both pizzas I ordered were banal or worse.

I consider pizza among the most important foods on Earth, for reasons I have written and would be happy to write again and again, but not right now. And so when I stumbled upon another series of disappointing peans to diFara, I finally could not longer stiffle my continual instinct to increase the volume of truth in the Cosmos rather than decrease it. No, that sounds grandiose. It is just that we all have the duty not to increase ignorance—in either the Dewey-decimal-sense of the word or the Buddhist sense, which may not be applicable here.

Adam, a long line means less in New York City than it means elsewhere. Can you imagine the people of a small town in the Sierras forming a long line to buy a banal (or worse) pizza? In New York City, Manhattan in particular, long lines form because they were long yesterday or because this morning they began long and consequently will not shrink for the rest of the day. A mathematician should study this. Or a statistician. But for now we can benefit from an analogy to the word "factoid," which became current, as I remember it, about four years ago, especially on cable news network stations. But it was used to mean, "a tiny fact" or "a fact of so little significance that if I called it a fact, you would consider me trivial, which of course I am."
The definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, the O.E.D., is far more useful: factoid, n. and a.

n. Something that becomes accepted as a fact, although it is not (or may not be) true; spec. an assumption or speculation reported and repeated so often that it is popularly considered true; a simulated or imagined fact. 1973 N. Mailer Marilyn i. 18/2 Factoids+that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.

Naive and trustful as I am, I did not understand the application of the factoid principle to food until I stood in line for two hours to get into Tomoe Sushi on Thompson Street, which for several years had received a 27 rating in Zagat. The slices of fish were awkward, clumsy, warm, outsized, and while not "fishy" tasting, not remarkably fresh. It was time to return to Freud's analysis of the madness of crowds. Maybe someday.

For now, I'll summarize and abbreviate my view of what an ideal pizza should be: A pizza is a flatbread with a sparse but often intensely-flavorful topping, usually of Italian origin, especially in its olive oil. It is not an edible platter for Italian cold cuts, cheeses, and marinated, roasted vegetables. It is a flatbread, a wonderfully delicious, yeasty flatbread baked on a hearth; the hearth can be the stone or metal floor of an electric or gas deck oven, but small logs of wood burning on a stone surface are preferable for both flavor and temperature, which ideally should vary between about 600 dg. F. at the hearth and 800 or 900 dg. in the air above it, just right for finishing the flatbread in 90 to 120 seconds so that the dough underneath the pizza is crisp and charred; the top and topping are burnished and bubbling; and the dough in between is more chewy than crunchy or bready; and the rim of dough around the circumference is puffy and crisp and shot through with bubbles of air. (The Italians call it the cornichone, which sounds like the French corniches, the three highways that curve above the Riviera. The crust should have the assertive taste of roasted, yeasted, refined wheat.

This pizza, this flatbread, is little different from the first yeasted bread ever baked, on a stone--perhaps three thousand years ago in Egypt, which is why I become sentimental and even teary whenever I consider pizza in its very heart and essence.

I don't become teary or sentimental at DiFara's. Di Fara's is the Tomoe Sushi of wood-baked yeasted flatbread.

A good pizza is a flatbread with

[Note: This is the complete text of Mr. Steingarten's comment. He either hit "send" too early or reached the limits of Slice's comment character count. —The Mgmt.]

Anyone who thinks DiFara is a shrine doesn't know what God is. I'm afraid I'm very immoderate in this, and I actually hate people, hate them, really dislike people who worship DiFara's.

That's a pretty succinct version of Mr. Steingarten's thoughts on Di Fara. In August 2009, he left a 3 a.m. diatribe on a Slice Di Fara post that was so long it appeared he may have hit the character-count limit in the comments.*

At one point he started talking about Eataly and had so much to say that Grub Street broke it out into its own post. Here's what he says about pizza there:

I spent an enormous amount of time at the pizza oven. I believe it's a similar pizza oven to the one they have at Paulie Gee's in Brooklyn, and to the one that Donatella Arpaia has built from scratch at her new pizzeria, which is not open yet. I do believe, and long have believed, that pizza is the perfect food. There's no other city like New York, where every block has a pizzeria where they're probably making dough from scratch. It's an unbelievable phenomenon, and I also find it very moving: On every street corner of New York there is someone, usually a man, who is performing a procedure that has not changed very much in 3,000 years. It has in the past moistened my eye to remember that.

The pizza wars — in Manhattan especially, though also Brooklyn — are really heating up. All the new pizzas — Keste, Motorino, Paulie Gee's — they're all making their pizzas in the Neapolitan fashion, which means the dough is almost never fully cooked. I remember when Ed Levine wrote his pizza book, in it he proposes that American pizzas can be better than Neapolitan pizzas. He thought that the pizzas he had in Naples had dough that was too soft, the crust was too soft, some versions were just inundated with sauce. Even though Ed is my friend I was very skeptical about that — it kind of reminded me of the people who used to go to China and come back and say American Chinese food is better. But then I returned to Naples, and I began to feel that Ed was correct. Still the best pizza in the United States probably is Pizza Bianco in Phoenix — don't worry about that, [chef Chris Bianco] was born in the Bronx — but I think that the new Neapolitan pizzas made in New York are truly great, and Eataly's is wonderful.

On the sustainability of the Eataly concept:

The thing that worries me is that I know that [Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich] are very particular about Italian food, and at a place like this all the people have to be at the top of their game all the time. I just imagine that would be very, very difficult. They're going to have to be on the edge for the rest of their lives, and it's very scary to imagine that. I spent all my time talking to the pizzaiolo, who has to go back to London in week. This is my concern: Many great people are going to have to return to their home bases, some to Italy, this guy to London, other people back to the rest of the empire. I just hope that they can maintain the very high level that I experienced there.

* Until then, I was unaware that there were even character-count limits in the comments here.

Of all the Little Italys across the U.S., New York City was blessed with the three best. From the original, in downtown Manhattan, to what was once the most authentically Italian, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and to the still-vibrant Arthur Avenue neighborhood in the Bronx. To quote Henry Hill, "It was a glorious time."

I use the past tense was because sadly many "Italian" neighborhoods are empty of Italians, their descendants, the culture, and food. Others, like the original Little Italy in downtown Manhattan, are run by many who pretend to be Italian for business purposes and of course lack Soul.

The Bronx always depressed me for various reasons, and after living there for four years, the feeling got worse. That said, the Bronx's Little Italy on and around Arthur Avenue still offers the best Italian food shopping experience. Though many of the restaurants are not good (yes, I said it, suck it), the ones that are good....are very good.

Roberto's, a well-respected, landmark restaurant, is one of the best in the area. I used to go in the '80s when it was Tony & Roberto's, though have not been back since.

A few years ago, the owner, Roberto Piacullo, from Salerno, set out to open a cheaper version of Roberto's and offer some of America's best pizza. He named the place 089 [aka Zero Otto Nove, as some folks call it —The Mgmt.] after the area code of Salerno. So, what do you do when you want to make some of the best pizza? You get one of the best pizzaioli.

His name is Riccardo Rinaldo, and he, too, hails from Salerno, a beautiful and charming city that introduces the Amalfi coast to the Mediterranean Sea (Tyrrhenian, to be exact).

It is also the province where my mother is from and where I have spent much of my time. Thanks to Rinaldo's talent as a pizzaiolo, 089 served what many believed to be some of the best pizza in America. After eating there years ago, it certainly did live up to the hype.

Pizzeria da Riccardo Via Crispi 79, Salerno 84126.

As famous as he became for his pizzas, Rinaldo also became known for having lines of girls swoon over him as he stretched dough and added toppings. So, you get it now? "Bronx Tail"? As great as the American experience was, Rinaldo longed for Salerno and eventually retured to open his own place there, Pizzeria da Riccardo.

The pizzeria fulfilled a dream of Rinaldo's, which, oddly enough, was to make Neapolitan, not Salernitana pizza. As we discussed the differences, Rinaldo told me, "I never liked the style of pizza here. I never wanted to make that. I prefer the Neapolitan style, and that's what I make."

Very well made pizza.

Compared to non-Neapolitan pizza, Salerno pizza is very similar to Neapolitan. The difference between Salerno's pizzas and that of neighboring Naples is that Salerno's are crisper, less puffy, less wet, and have a lower crust.

I always believed Americans would actually love Salernitana pizza and I always dreamed of opening a Salernitana pizzeria, not Neapolitan.

I feel like Moses when he got to choose which wife he wanted to marry.

Me and Riccardo.

Though the pizza he made for me was Neapolitan, Riccardo does alter it a bit for his Salernitani customers.

The pizza he served me was fantastic. I mean very good. He's a true pizzaiolo because he actually gives a shit about every pie he makes and suggested I take a picture of it, before I even had a chance to pull out my camera.

Though his place is tiny, perhaps offering only 100 square feet of eating space, all of which consists of a few chairs and counters replacing chairs, the warmth of his reception was enough to fill Stadio Arechi.

His pizzeria is also a rosticceria, so other foods are available. Rosticceria? What a great word! Now some schmuck in America will capitalize on it because people in New York fiend for anything to quench their soulless thirst.

Gelato di Bar Nettuno. 136 Lungomare Trieste, Salerno 84121.

For Gelato I usually go to one of Italy's favorite gelato spots, called Nettuno, located on Salerno's promenade.

Gulf of Salerno....slightly North of here towards Amalfi, I want my ashes thrown ceremoniously, but quietly, into the Mediterranean when I die.

It's famous for its ice cream sandwiches, brioche buns filled with the gelato of your choosing, sometimes topped with cream. I chose a cone with hazelnut and ricotta-pistachio cream. As I caught eye contact with a stunning girl on vacation with her mother and aunt, I let a third of it drip on my hands as I completely ruined the mood. I somehow managed to walk across the street to the point where the land met the Mediterranean. Ahhhhh, exactly where I want my cremated remains to be scattered. There's no better place to be spread.

—Gianluca