We just got a really nice, new-to-us barbeque from Nate’s parents, and today I christened it with grilled pizzas. I’ve done this before with moderate success (minus the charred bits 😉 ). My technique needs refining, but this is the basic idea!
For some reason I made four pizzas for only two of us. I get over-zealous with cooking sometimes. (OK, often.)
First, grill the veg for toppings (everything has been doused in olive oil, salt and pepper). This nifty veggie grilling rack is awesome. Look at those grill marks! I’m so proud.
Grill the tomatoes until they’re nice and soft and bursty – you then sort of smear them on the pizza base to make the “sauce”, but we’ll get to that later.
Roll out the dough. I used this recipe.
Before going any further, get everything all ready to go and assembled near the barbeque: toppings, grated cheese, sauces and oils, cooking implements, etc. Have the grill preheated and set on low to medium-low heat. For these first pizzas, I had the heat too high so the dough was almost burning before it was fully cooked, although the grill marks look pretty.
Brush one side of the dough with olive oil.
Slap it down on the grill.
If it immediately starts to bubble up like this, your grill is too hot! (Hindsight is 20/20 😉 ) Brush the dough with olive oil.
Check the bottom of your crust. Ideally it will turn a nice golden brown with slightly darker grill marks (see the next pizza for a good example of this!). If your grill is too hot, you will end up with dark grill marks and undercooked dough. Oh well, it all worked out in the end. Take it off the heat, flip it grilled-side-up, and add the toppings: smash the grilled tomatoes with your hands and smear them on the dough (or you could use a fork, but I like to play with my food), top with salami, grilled onions, and grilled peppers.
Add cheese (my favorite part!) and place back on the grill. At this point I clued in and turned the heat down – actually I turned off the two right-side burners and let it cook via indirect heat from the two left-side burners (on medium-high to high) so that it didn’t get any more charred and the dough had a chance to cook. Close the lid and let the cheese melt and bottom crust get brown and crisp. Try not to peek too often or all the heat will escape and it will take forever. (Ask me how I know this!)
Melty and golden.
Voila!
Take 2: This time I started with low heat. Much more successful! Also the sun was going down so these pictures are getting progressively darker…
Instead of bubbling up in little bubbles, this time the dough inflated like a balloon (or a pita pocket – now I know how they do that!). I just smushed it back down with a spatula.
When the bottom looks like this, take it off the grill and add the toppings on the grilled side (don’t forget to brush the un-grilled side with olive oil first).
These ones had pesto, grilled asparagus, shrimp, sundried tomatoes, and ricotta cheese.
Cheesed and back on the grill. By now the grill had cooled down so I had these directly over the burners on low heat. Lid down and wait for the cheese to melt!
It was getting dark and starting to rain, and it took a while for these babies to cook (at least nothing was burning this time!). I think it would have been faster if all four burners had been on low. As soon as the cheese was melted I pulled these off the grill…
…and voila again! Delicious. Even Nate agreed, and he doesn’t like shrimp on pizza.
The resources I used for this method come from Martha Stewart (although maybe I should have read the directions more carefully – it might have saved me from almost-burnt pizza!) and Alton Brown of Good Eats. They both explain how to grill a pizza much better than I do. I hope the pictures make up for it! 😉
Totally unrelated to pizza:
You might have noticed that the domain of this blog has changed to korenainthekitchen.com – no more WordPress in there. Thanks to Barb and Bryce for their generosity in making this happen, and to Jason for his help 🙂
Also, I added an RSS feed. Subscribe! Tell your friends!
Okay, this is too strange… last night I used your pizza dough recipe and made pesto pizza! (Although, I made mine in the oven, but whatever… it’s still a weird coincidence!) One day, when we have a half-decent BBQ, I’ll have to try this.
Do you make your pesto from scratch as well? You should share that one, one day. I use the Jamie Oliver recipe and I love it, but I’m admittedly not very skilled in the kitchen and therefore easily pleased 😀
Hehe, that’s awesome!!
I made a bunch of pesto last summer and froze it in ice cube trays for individual portion sizes. I actually don’t have a favorite pesto recipe yet – I’ll have to Jamie Oliver’s! His stuff is usually pretty great 🙂
Ha, in retrospect I love how casually I’m all like, “Korena, you should provide me with more awesome recipes, *snap snap*!” Didn’t mean it quite that way!
I like his recipes because of how casual he is about things… it’s like, “a handful of this, a dash of that, use this if you like…” Sometimes I think I could benefit from a few more specifics, but sometimes it works to be reassured not to worry so much 😀
The ice cube tray idea is genius. I remember Kachina saying once that she freezes it in a tube of some description and then just slices off what she needs. You ladies are so smart.
http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/vegetarian-recipes/basic-pesto
I love that you’re actually trying out the stuff I post here, so I will gladly do what I can to provide!!
I really like JO’s casual approach as well – that’s generally how I am when I’m cooking. It’s been really challenging actually trying to quantify the amounts of things when I post my own recipes!
The great thing about cooking is that usually, the specifics don’t really matter – unless you’re doing something really complicated, a dash of this and a handful of that are pretty much all you need to know! And as you get more comfortable, you’ll start to get an idea of just how much of something you should use. I really like “cooking by feel” 🙂
And I think Kachina said she makes pesto without the garlic and cheese, freezes it in a log, then slices off what she needs, thaws it, and adds garlic and parmesan as needed. Genious!
There’s actually a healthy debate going on in the comments section of Jamie’s pesto recipe about whether or not you should freeze it with the cheese in it. Some argue that cheese is commonly frozen in Italy, others say you can’t. I know in my family we always froze cheese? But that was only Cheddar. I admit I don’t really know much about it and haven’t ever tried it myself. (Well, that’s a lie. I’m in the middle of trying it… I tossed my leftovers in the freezer. We’ll see how it goes!)
And also, I should add that the whole “go by feel” thing is true of cooking but definitely not of baking. This is obvious to most of your readers I’m sure, but yeah, I keep having to remind myself: baking is chemistry, Katy.
(I also like to blame many of my failures on my oven, though. Oh, what I would give for an oven that doesn’t spike upwards of 50 degrees for no reason at all!)
I’ve only ever frozen cheese that I was going to melt/cook with later, simply because I heard that the texture gets weird after it thaws out. I’ve never really experimented with frozen cheese, but my frozen pesto-with-cheese seems fine?
Yes, baking is definitely the time to bring out the measuring cups and spoons!! 😉
Have you thought about getting an oven thermometer? At least you’d know when it was heat spiking before you ended up with burnt cookies!
Well, I just ate my previously-frozen pesto and my verdict is: I couldn’t tell one way or the other! I mean, overall it didn’t taste quite as good as the fresh but I couldn’t tell that anything weird had happened to the cheese. And, now that you mention it, the texture DOES totally go weird with frozen cheese. I remember our cheddar would go kind of crumbly and wouldn’t slice nicely. But then, Parmesan is already hard and crumbly so would the effect be negligible? Hmm.
We do have an internal thermometer for the oven, but the problem is that there’s no way to actually see it through the little window… so you have to open the oven door in order to see the temp… which changes it. And you can’t be opening the door every few minutes to make sure it isn’t spiking. Ah well, one day I’ll have a nice oven and then I’ll probably lament having nothing to blame my burned baking on 😉
PS, I think this is the next pesto recipe I’m going to try this summer, it sounds fantastic!
http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/001570.html
Mmmmm. To my eye, that recipe looks similar to Jamie’s, except with significantly more garlic? But regarding the amount of basil… see, this is where I tend to get confused by vague quantities. What do you think constitute a “large bunch”? Isn’t that assuming that basil is sold in the same sort of bunches everywhere you go? At least handfuls I can get a confident visual, lol.
I love what she writes about the chopping vs. processing. Jamie’s recipe (wow I’ve said the name Jamie an annoying number of times – sorry, it’s my only frame of reference!) asks you to use a mortar and pestle, but I don’t have one large enough. The first time I tried chopping it I definitely didn’t chop it small enough, and thus couldn’t taste the basil enough. This time I used my hand blender (I don’t have a processor) and I agree with what this woman is saying… it was a bit too paste-like.
Yeah, I made my last batch (now frozen) in the blender, and it definitely came out too paste-like… it almost tasted like grass when I first made it! Thankfully it seems to have mellowed into a more basil-y taste now.
Also: that blog looks amazing.
We’ve had some BBQ pizza fails. Great tips, you make it look easy.
Thanks 🙂 Maybe not easy, but it was fun! I definitely think the key is getting the grill at the right temperature, and having all the toppings close at hand and ready to go. There’s definitely some room for improvement!
OMG, this looks SO good and might be the cure for how to make pizza when we are on the boat. I’m definitely trying this method. And I love that you are your own brandname now. (Look out Martha.) Good old Barb and Bryce, eh? I’m surprised you/they didn’t change it to The Lovely Korena Vine! And BTW, there’s a really good pesto recipe in The Moosewood Cookbook and it even gives reasonable measurements for the amount of basil you need.
So, some reflections as the “first time” pizzas cook on a cold windy day (so they’re taking even longer than I thought):
1) it takes a lot of time and a lot of backing and forthing between the kitchen and the BBQ to grill the veggies and cook the pizzas, so start early enough
2) don’t make the pizza shells too big, otherwise you have to cook them one at a time, which at least doubles the time it takes
3) if you open the BBQ lid a billion times because you are afraid everything is burning, it increases the time even more, so…perhaps start in the morning!
4) I love doing the tomatoes that way. I mushed in some pesto, too.
5) yours look WAY better than ours! I cut off the burnt parts of the crust and no-one knew any better. (I made them too big, anyway, so it was good to cut off parts of the crust.)
6) it’s good to use low heat. Low heat stops burning.
7) Your dad is STARVING as he waits!!!
8) Thanks for being inspiring, Korena!! 🙂
Ha, yes, I forgot to mention: it takes a while! Your experience sounds a lot like mine when I first did this… we ate rather charred pizza that night 😉 (And we were eating it a good 90 minutes after I started, lol!)
The backing and forthing from kitchen to BBQ – this is just good evidence that you need a full outdoor kitchen built around the BBQ 😉