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What I have concluded is you do not need nuclear reactor temps to get a good pizza. If you are making dough, leave out the sugar. 425-475 works as a great range. Warm up a stabilized kamado with stone for a solid 45 min before cooking pizzas. Make sure to cook as high in the dome as possible. Fire bricks make a great shim for an extra 3-4 inches of vertical if needed. I always use a pizza peel and parchment paper for easy placement on the stone. Although I am guilty of violating this, err on the side of more sparingly on the toppings for better results. Always have many cold beverages on hand for safety sake and most importantly, have lots of fun!

I also have been poring through Aaron Franklin’s book, and watching his videos online. They are all really outstanding. I very much like his approach to making rubs, to the point that I’m not sure if I’ll ever have to buy a commercial rub ever again. This may seem a bit of a weird comparison, but I think one reason his book really resonated with me is that his approach to food is a lot like a top-notch sushi chef’s: simple ingredients of the highest quality, and obsessive attention to detail and technique. In general, that’s the approach to food that I’ve always gravitated to. If nothing else, I followed his approach when making my very first brisket, and this is how it turned out: Of course, having a KK grill helped a lot, too. The only places where I deviated from Aaron Franklin’s approach was that I cooked this brisket at around 225ºF, going up to 250ºF at the end, and I didn’t bother with wrapping, since I felt that the interior of a KK grill would be more moist than an offset cooker.

After not buying a BBQ book in over a decade, I thoroughly enjoyed Aaron Franklin's Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto, published in April 2015. http://www.amazon.com/Franklin-Barbecue-Meat-Smoking-Manifesto-Aaron-ebook/dp/B00N6PFBDW/ As everyone's circumstances are different, and our ceramic cookers behave very differently from Webers or offset-fireboxes, the only book I'd found useful back in the day was Robb Walsh's Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook, which by describing the history and diversity of techniques in central Texas BBQ, serves more as background philosophy for one's own search than an actual cookbook. http://www.amazon.com/Legends-Texas-Barbecue-Cookbook-Recollections/dp/0811829618/ Aaron Franklin is self-taught, while very much in the central Texas tradition. There's a remarkable similarity with self-taught bread bakers, who have written the most useful tomes in that category. The obligatory restaurant origin-legend is nevertheless an amusing read. Then an equipment chapter that dives headlong into how to make the ideal smoker from a 1,000 gallon propane tank, assuming basic metal-working skills? Ha, reading this is as close as I may come to welding. Franklin's preferred style involves a very contemplative, simple treatment of the best meat available. This was the hook that got me in: I felt like everything I'd learned in a decade was an itty bit of what he had figured out with a compatible philosophy, and that by the end of a day's reading I'd be transported much further along. Then the differences became apparent. His preferred pit temperature is 275 F for everything. Rub goes on by eye (no weighing salt) mere hours before cooking. He manages moisture along with smoke, and foils (or butcher paper for brisket) to close out the cook. Again like running a bakery, there are many schedules that could work, but one needs to figure out a protocol that maximizes production given the logistical contraints of available storage, equipment, and worker schedules. His discovered principles are as much a solution to these constraints as global truths. Our problems are different; my biggest logistical concern is fitting the cook around a night's sleep. Nevertheless I intend to try his protocols as close to verbatim as one can in a ceramic cooker. Once one has hit a plateau in anything, one can only go further by starting again from scratch, and seeing if the "science" one believes is repeatable. If I fear anything from old age, it is the "I already know I am right!" ossification that keeps one from venturing back down these rabbit holes. While I can "place" this book as cooking the highest quality meats in a central Texas tradition, its greatest strength is explaining a system of thought that allows one to adapt to changing circumstances. Mainstream books assume a Weber and cheap meats, teaching how to mask all this with 12 ingredient sauces. Franklin is unapologetic about the chapter on welding, but has dealt with his fair share of hardships trying to produce great BBQ while traveling. There's been much debate in this forum on the best way to cook brisket; Franklin sees a continuum of technique parametrized by the characteristics of the meat, melding the fast and slow approaches debated here into one world view. I nervously read into the section on "dwells" wondering if he'd flub the science, only to realize that he understood dwells better than any author I'd read. He then takes some of the myth out of smoke rings. I'd had the impression that BBQ judges get their tastebuds zonked early from bad smoke, and go by visuals that competitors learn to manipulate. Just as the crema in a good espresso is an easily manipulated artifact orthogonal to actual coffee quality. Franklin doesn't worry about producing smoke rings. The recipes are if anything an afterthought, one learns instead from all these master class side discussions. The recipes serve to consolidate the points in the book, to make it clear there really isn't anything else going on. It was fun reading this after serving pork butt to 60 people for Sunday lunch, and deflecting every "what did you do?" question with "as little as possible". The discussions on trimming and on slicing brisket are alone worth the price of admission. This is a "once every decade" BBQ book for me, highly recommended.

In terms of temp you're right. My driveway is pavers and when we were making our decision we walked on it barefoot on a relativly warm day (not 105+ like we often get, proably closer to high 90s) and it was just way to hot. We didn't want to be tracking down flip flops all the time by the pool, also we have one grandson and I'm sure we'll have more grandchildren down the road and worried about them running around on scortching pavers. For us there was no question the pavers look better, lower longterm cost etc. but living in this climate there was only one choice for us.

It certainly looks delicious to me

Yep, looks like a "fresh" ham to me. Or pork shoulder. They typically go for around 99 cents a pound here but can fluctuate by around 25 cents up or down. That 500 degree hit you did to it made what we call cracklin down here in Cajun country. And it's delicious. I'd go for your pork roast any day!