I’m in Modesto, California this week for The Meet: Blues, Brews and Barbecue. It’s one of the biggest barbecue contests west of the Mississippi held in conjunction with a national caliber track meet. I’m sharing a stage with Ray “Dr. BBQ” Lampe and Brent Walton, one of the best competition BBQ cooks in the country who also lives in this area. We’re teaching a BBQ 101 class in front of 3000 or so people this Saturday, and my segment is about grilled pizzas.

As part of the buildup, we taped a couple of preview spots for Sacramento’s News10 morning show, Sacramento & Co. You can see me on today’s video clip here . Yesterday’s clip with Ray and Brent is here. Part of my mission was to pitch this class and get people interested in coming to learn how to grill a pizza.

How did that pizza look on the grill? Bet you didn’t realize it wasn’t baked. I was asked to have a pizza made before the spot because I only had about 60 seconds for my bit. That’s not enough time to bake pizza live for the camera. If making a cold pizza look delicious weren’t hard enough, we also didn’t have that grill fired up, either. We didn’t want spend all morning firing up the charcoal and waiting for the grill to cool down after the taping. So what to do? I put the flame spreader tip on my propane torch and “baked” the pesto and chicken sausage pizza. How’d I do?