Grilled Pizza

My brother Dave came over to visit the other day, and–since it was around dinner time, and since he is the designated family grill meister–we made grilled pizza.

If you’ve never had grilled pizza, you MUST try it. It’s easy to prepare, FUN to make, and very tasty to eat. This is a really great thing to do with guests too, because everything can be prepped in advance. AND everyone can have their own pizza JUST the way they like it.

For grilled pizza, I use an America’s Test Kitchen recipe for the crust, but I think any pizza dough recipe would work fine, as long as you rolled it out a little thicker than you normally would.

I love getting creative with our toppings, and this week I put out roasted red peppers, diced shallots, chopped jalapenos, sliced green olives, and tomato salad. But out of three of us I I was the only one who used ALL of those things on one pizza!

So the way this works is that you take the rolled-out dough to your hot grill and cook just one side. We have a Weber grill with burners that run the length of the grill from side to side, and I picked up a few tips from Dave this week on the best way to cook pizza on this type of grill:

• He got the grill roaring hot first with all burners on high, and cleaned the grate with a wire brush.
• He turned off the burners and then cautiously sprayed it with non-stick cooking spray (you may still get a momentary flare up so be super careful).
• He turned the grill back on, but set the middle burners as low as they would go.
• The outer two burners were turned on to just a few ticks above medium.
• He cooked our pizza in the middle of the grill via the indirect heat of the outer two burners.

Tip: If  you have a grill where the burners run front to back, these hints from Dave will still apply, but your primary heat sources will be the sides instead of the front and back.

So once Dave had cooked all of our pizza dough rounds on one side, we brought them into the kitchen and arranged our sauce and toppings on the cooked side. (Did I forget to mention that we also had some of the amazing Daiya cheese? Cos we did.)

Then the pizzas went back out onto the grill to finish cooking. Dave left the grill lid closed pretty much the whole time to allow the cheese and toppings to cook, but he did check the underneath of our pizzas a few times to make sure they weren’t cooking too fast.

The result was AWESOME pizza with beautiful grill marks, a crispy crust, and excellent flavor. Each one was a work of art. They were almost too pretty to eat…ALMOST…. :)