Perfect Pizza ... on the Grill
Posted by Danielle Bean in Food on Thursday, April 15, 2010 10:00 AM
Once, when I posted about making homemade pizza here at Faith & Family, someone in the comments recommended trying it on the grill. At the time, I remember thinking that the idea of grilled pizza was a little too “out there” for this cautious cook.
But I recalled the recommendation when I came across a grilled pizza recipe in a favorite cookbook of mine recently. This recipe called for thawed frozen bread dough for the crust, which made it all the more appealing for a simple, last minute dinner idea a few weeks ago.
I gave it a try ... It was a disaster. And a hit.
You see, to make grilled pizza, you place the uncooked dough on the grill, cook it for a bit, then turn it over, add the sauce and toppings, and then close the grill cover to let it finish cooking and melt the cheese.
The recipe I was following was for individual pizzas, so I made up little dough disks and put them on the hot grill. But then the crust shrank and fattened up as it cooked. Before my eyes, my perfect flattened disks turned themselves into something more like pizza balls.
Undaunted, I flipped them, topped them, and served them to a first group of kids while I hurried to bake some more.
It wasn’t long, though, before 8-year-old Stephen joined me at the grill, holding his plate full of pizza ball.
“The pizza you are making is really good,” he began, carefully navigating his mother’s tender feelings, “But there’s no way I can eat this thing.”
He had a point. When I abandoned the grill and entered the house, I found that his siblings were equally frustrated and unable to bite the pizza balls on their own plates.
I tried cutting some into pieces for the littler kids and attempted the grill again with some fresh dough.
The trick, I learned, is to make the original disks of dough super flat and thin. Then, as the dough cooks and puffs up, it becomes a regular pizza crust instead of an inedible ball. I practiced my grilling skills with a few more pizzas and finally managed to produce a pretty perfect-looking one before Dan got home from work.
The kids had mangled pizza balls and bowls of cereal for dinner, but Dan had a really nice-looking grilled individual-sized pizza that he pronounced “really delicious.” Score!
If you’d like to try your hand at grilled pizza, I recommend checking out the pizza grilling tips at All Recipes first. You can get creative with toppings and have fun grilling outdoors, but don’t let my hard-earned experience go to waste—roll that dough out real thin!
Happy grilling!
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