Grilled Pizza... You Know You Want To

June 7, 2019 10:25 PM

America's Test Kitchen teaches you how to make the best grilled pizza [video link, segment starts at 0m50s, ends at 9m45s]. Like, seriously, we've had this a lot and it's amazing.
posted by hippybear (20 comments total)

See also: Bon Appetit's recent "Making the Perfect Pizza" series.
posted by saladin at 4:28 AM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]

If you are gluten intolerant and miss your pizza, my cheap and fast trick is: brown rice tortillas, sauce and your preferred toppings, oven @ 425° for 15 minutes. If you start by turning on the oven to pre-heat, the whole process takes 30 minutes. I keep thinking to try it in a pan on top but haven't yet.
posted by Bee'sWing at 5:28 AM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]

Here's another recipe I highly recommend: Serious Eat's Pan Pizza Recipe which is super tasty and has the added benefit of sweet, sweet, Pizza Hut nostalgia.
posted by jeremias at 6:02 AM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]

Oh goodness yes that pan pizza recipe is CHOICE
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:17 AM on June 8, 2019

Guess what we're having for our supper tomorrow night?

Thanks hippybear !
posted by james33 at 7:13 AM on June 8, 2019

Oil in pizza dough. Philistines!
posted by surlyben at 7:23 AM on June 8, 2019

I love America's Test Kitchen most because they actually explain why they're having you do stuff like resting the dough for 24hrs. They're recipes sometimes strike me as a bit precious in that it takes a certain of level of income, time and material comfort to be able to, for example, make a recipe like this, but, especially in their cookbooks, the paragraphs of explanation really help you to understand what your doing and why your doing it.

Their desserts are fantastic.
posted by oddman at 7:24 AM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]

If you live in the Midwest, frozen pizzas from Home Run Inn come with instructions on how to prepare them on the grill and they totally work. The yum factor is obviously not as peak high as scratch-made but the degree of effort required is far lower.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:03 AM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]

To be less flippant, I think you can make a credible pizza dough with only four ingredients (flour, water, yeast, and salt) and a rise time of only a couple of hours (as little as one in a pizza emergency, assuming it's warm out). The important things are to let it rest for 10-20 minutes after mixing the ingredients together, but before kneading, and to make sure it's a pretty wet dough (like only just kneadable without making a huge mess). Also a hot stove and a well-preheated baking stone.

Things like long rises, oil, sugar (added mostly for color, I think), herbs and spices... those are the curlicues and flourishes that might take it to the next level, but I think they confuse the issue and add new ways for beginners to fail. That makes me sad because I love pizza and want more people to know how easy it is to make from scratch.

That said, I'll probably never get tired of checking out pizza recipes, and grilled pizza is great. You can make it while camping!
posted by surlyben at 8:31 AM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]

I make a lot of oven pizza at home, mostly following Reinhart's book. This recipe is not that different from what I do, what the book calls a "Neo-Neopolitan dough" (distinguished by using a little olive oil). Some details from the video on things specific to grilling pizza:

Making dough: high gluten flour, less yeast than normal, some olive oil, autolyse the dough. Cold proof for 24+ hours.

Blind cooking dough: stretch dough out on a heavily oiled sheet pan. Lots and lots of oil on top and bottom of dough. Cook it 2-3 minutes blind (no toppings) in a covered grill. Turn it 90 degrees, cook another 2 minutes. Flip, cook 2 more minutes, take it off the grill. Now you have a nicely grilled piece of flatbread!

Making pizza: start with cooked dough, then oil the top of the dough more. Then put on toppings. Grill for 4 minutes, done.

Honestly you could get 90% of the way there by buying a precooked pizza dough like Boboli and just warming it oiled up on the grill. Your own dough will be better, but if you're looking for a massive shortcut it exists. It's a very different process from cooking toppings on a wet dough, like normal oven or deep dish pizza.
posted by Nelson at 9:13 AM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]

Love ATK especially now that the dour Chris Kimball is out the door. And I've always enjoyed the explanations as to the why of things, similar to Alton Brown's methodology.

That said, this recipe is impractical af for many people, and many don't have room/money for a food processor or 24 hours' lead time to think about pizza. Or it's just impossible, if you're an apartment dweller as I am.

I just go to my local pizzeria, get a rolled-out dough and cook it in the oven with toppings. Easy pizza. Nice to see Julia Collin again, though.
posted by the sobsister at 10:38 AM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]

Pizza dough isn't as hard as all that! You can mix the dough by hand in a bowl, just takes a little longer. Also you can pre-make dough balls and freeze them. You could even skip the 24 hour proof but it adds so much flavor it's worth a little planning. It's the grilling part that seems hard to me; despite how simple it looked that transfer of dough to the grill is scary af. And you have to have a grill. Oven is easier although that greatly benefits from owning a pizza stone.

Nothing wrong with buying rolled out dough as a shortcut though! The fact it's baked fresh is what makes 90% of the difference in quality.
posted by Nelson at 10:55 AM on June 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

My favorite trick is that most pizza places I've found will sell you dough. So if you have a place you like ask them, you might be surprised! I know we made pizza a lot more when we had a stone that fit our oven because we didn't have to worry about making the dough.
posted by Carillon at 11:35 AM on June 8, 2019

Pizza is good. The dough is not even that hard to make. But it's one of those things that I feel like is never better, never easier. never more worth the effort made at home than bought from a restaurant.

Though we do enjoy the Serious Eats "crispy bar-style pizza" now and again.
posted by crush at 1:46 PM on June 8, 2019

Just about to make a pizza today. A local import shop sells frozen '00' pizza dough, so that's my lazy shortcut.

As for making it, I can't recommend this 'gadget' enough: The Ooni. I have an older generation, but this will make a pizza in under 1 minute if when it's hot enough.
posted by el io at 2:47 PM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]

Huh! Have you tried a sequence of pizza/grand fours/ petit fours baking in it?
posted by clew at 4:31 PM on June 8, 2019

"Huh! Have you tried a sequence of pizza/grand fours/ petit fours baking in it?"

I have not. It cools down pretty quickly, actually. My non-pizza next project with it will be trying to bake some proper naan. The older generation pretty small; I might upgrade next year (particularly if they come out with yet another model; they've been doing incremental upgrades for the past few years).
posted by el io at 7:02 PM on June 8, 2019

I have tried making pizza at home, and have not been happy. It occurs to me that putting the dough into a blasting hot furnace is crucial as pizza ovens are generally much much hotter than home ovens. I'm going to give this a go.

I grew up in New Jersey taking pizza for granted as a food that most places made to perfection. Later I moved to the Midwest and now cry for humanity every time I eat pizza. Hopefully, tomorrow night when I cry, it will be tears of joy. :-)
posted by xammerboy at 11:24 PM on June 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

Literally any recipe you can devise will be impractical for someone. As an apartment dweller myself, I don't have the luxury of a grill, either. But I don't mind if people who do have a grill want to put pizza on it.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:47 AM on June 9, 2019

There's a lot of oil in that recipe.
posted by essexjan at 10:28 AM on June 9, 2019 [1 favorite]