We got a fancy new pizza pan for the grill. Now that we have a gas grill to go along with our charcoal grill, we finally have an area big enough to cook a pizza on. We have done this a couple times, but this last one was actually worthy of a blog.
We decided on Pizza Margherita, because the basil in our garden does not seem to be effected by the excessive heat. We also had some fresh tomatoes from Zack's parent's garden. We didn't make our own crust or sauce for this one, because it was a weeknight meal. Someday we'll figure out the perfect recipes for those, but for now, we're using store bought.
Here's what you need:
3-4 tomatoes, sliced
15-20 leaves of fresh basil
1 ball of fresh mozzarella - trust us, get fresh mozzarella and not shredded.
Drizzle of Extra Virgin olive oil
1/2 jar of pizza sauce
1 pre-made pizza crust
Here's what you do:
Start by heating your grill. We have a 4 burner grill, so we heated the outside burners to medium, and the inside 2 burners we kept on low.
The pizza crust we purchased was made for a rectangular pizza. We, however, have a round pizza grill pan. If this happens to you, you'll simply need to clean the counter and sprinkle the counter with flour to prevent sticking. Roll the crust out and the knead into a ball. Make sure you add flour as necessary. You don't want it to be sticky!
Now, roll the dough out with a rolling pin to the desired round shape. Pizza dough is fairly elastic, so you may have to pick it up and toss it around a little bit too. Once you have the crust in a round, place on the pan and build up the edges so that you have a place to pool your sauce.
Spoon your sauce over the dough so that it's coated, but you can still see the dough through it. It will make things much less messy in the long run if you don't over sauce.
Add the tomatoes first, then mozzarella, then basil. Finally, drizzle the entire pizza with a bit of extra virgin olive oil.
After a couple of not so exciting grilled pizzas, we knew at this point that this one was going to rock, so we snapped a picture.
Place on the grill and close the lid for 10 minutes or so, or until the cheese is melted and the crust is golden.
Enjoy!
That looks great!
ReplyDeleteHow about a picture of just your grill pan? What makes it different from a regular pizza pan?
The only time I tried pizza on the grill, like you said, it only turned out so so. I did it directly on the grates. In the summer heat, I'm looking for a way to grill it and keep the heat outside. (It's a bit warm down here in TN too.) So, keep us up to speed on this.
For making pizza dough, I use my bread machine. Wore my great old one out a year ago (a Hitachi) and replaced it with an Emeril one. It's not as good, but it does make ok pizza dough and it's easy. I use their receipe but add a little bit of whole wheat flour for more body. It freezes well, so we always have it on hand.
Pizza tonight!
T
T- I believe they used a Pampered Chef Pizza Grill Pan. We have one too.
ReplyDeleteMichelle and Zack, this looks awesome! We hadn't tried the store bought and were struggling with our dough. We might have to toy around with this, since sadly, we do not own a bread maker.
We did use the Pampered Chef Pizza Grill Pan! We'll work on a separate blog about it soon!
ReplyDelete