Sometimes you don’t want to heat up your kitchen. And especially as the weather gets warmer and people want to move outdoors to the barbeque, let’s transfer those indoor meals right outside!
The nice thing about this crazy idea of having pizza on the grill is that it literally cooks up in 10 minutes. BAM, and you have an amazingly good meal on your plate.
As Complicated As You Want
With grilled pizza, you can 100% make your own crust, and make your own sauce — I will do both of those, for sure, but I’m a total overachiever, LOL!
But for this recipe I’m going to start with what we call the MVP (the Minimally Viable Product). That means, what is the very least we have to do to get that pie onto my plate!
Once you get the pizza-grilling part down pat, then kick it up a notch by making your own sauce and dough.
So for now, let’s get started on our MVP:
You’ll Need
First of all, you’ll need to have all these ingredients together and ready to roll from the start. This comes together in a hurry, so get it all organized.
- Pizza dough — enough for the number of servings you’re preparing. There are a number of “clean” versions available.
- Pizza sauce — no more than 1/4 cup per person. Again, there are pre-made versions available that have no artificial ingredients.
- Cheeses
- Focus on softer cheese such as mozzarella, grated Parm, or goat cheese fresh mozzarella (or the softer, silkier, mozzarella di bufala), blue cheese, fresh ricotta (see notes below)
- Toppings
- all toppings will need to be ready to eat, such as roasted red peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, sliced and pitted olives, and greenery such as arugula and basil. (see notes below)
Instructions
First, preheat the grill to about 400-ish degrees (if your grill doesn’t have a temperature gauge, you’ve reached this temperature when you can comfortably hold your hand about 5 inches above the grate for just one second—be careful!).
Be sure to only heat up one side of your grill. If you have two burners that can be turned on/off independently, that’s the easiest. If not, that’s okay too, just put your coals on one side of the basin.
As the grill temp is coming up, prep the crust. Lightly flour a surface such as a pizza peel, cutting board, or in a pinch you could use a cookie sheet that doesn’t have a lip. Place the crust onto the surface and shape it into the form you like.
Once the pizza crust is ready, brush the top of the dough with olive oil. The olive oil side will be the first side that you place onto the grill.
Now carefully move the dough to the grill, and gently set the crust — oiled side down — onto the preheated grill. Remember to place it over the side of the grill that is hot.
This could burn very quickly if your coals are quite hot. So really attend to your pizza bottom, because it could take 2 to 3 minutes, max, before it’s got light grill lines on it. One way to keep an eye on it is to shift and rotate it every fifteen seconds or so to make sure it’s grilled up nice and evenly.
Once that side is ready, you will flip the crust over to the other side, and scoot it from the hot side of the grill to the cool side. Cooking your pizza on that cool side of the grill will allow your ingredients to cook longer, without burning the bottom of the crust in the process.
As soon as it’s in place, quickly add your sauce, a sprinkle of cheese, and all of your toppings except for the greenery.
Do not over-cheese the pizza! Too much cheese will not even have enough time to melt before the bottom is done.
Once everything is in place, close the lid and cook until the cheese is melted, which will only take about 3 to 5 minutes. To see if it’s ready, you’ll gently lift the edge of the crust with a spatula to see the state of your bottom. Do not burn the bottom.
Once the bottom is ready, add any remaining toppings (like arugula, a balsamic reduction is awesome here, red pepper flakes or a final sprinkle of Parm over the top of you like). Slide the pizza back onto your pizza peel or other flat surface where you can cut it for your group.
Notes:
If there’s one thing that’s of the utmost importance with grilled pizza, it’s having everything on hand and organized before you start. These cook so fast (depending on the strength of your fire, and whether you remember to place the pizza over the cool portion of the grill), that there’s no time to mess around looking for your toppings. That means that every topping you use has to either be par-cooked, grilled, or thin enough that it’ll cook through via the residual heat in the pizza.
Great toppings for this pizza could include:
- Black olives, sliced
- Sundried tomatoes, chopped
- Artichoke hearts, roughly chopped
- Mushrooms, sliced
- Roasted red peppers, sliced
- Olive salad, Muffaletta-style
- Of course, almost any grilled veg works perfectly.
- A perfect workflow here is to grill your veg for the pizza first, and when they’re done put the crust on to finish it all up!