Relish Austin: Howto grill artisan-style pizzas at home
If you can grill hamburgers, you can grill a pizza.
But grilling a pizza? Wouldn’t it be easier to get one delivered?
Of course it would be easier to call Domino’s, but the same is true when going to the effort of making something more familiar on a backyard grill, like a hamburger, and if you can mix, form and sear burger patties without them drying out or falling apart, you can handle a fire-roasted pizza, I promise.
When I make pizza at home, I usually use Jim Lahey’s no-knead pizza recipe, which calls for making small pizza rounds, dressing them with minimal ingredients and baking them in a broiler at super-high temperatures (450 degrees or higher).
This technique makes crispy, easy and artisan-quality pies — you can read a previous column about this ap- proach to pizza-making at austin360.com/relishaustin — but now that it’s preferable to cook outside rather than heat the house inside, it’s time to take those skills to the grill, even if you’re working on a charcoal kettle grill on its last legs, like mine.
Just as cooks have the choice to make grilling burgers as easy (pre-made patties and buns) or as difficult (three-meat monstrosities on from-scratch brioche) as they’d like, we can approach backyard pizza-making with the same sense of ambition or forgiveness.
Pizza dough is either something you enjoy making or something you don’t, and now that so many grocery stores carry frozen balls of pizza dough — which lack the preservative flavor of prebaked pizza crusts and cost a buck or two — there’s one less excuse for not occasionally going to the effort of making it at home.
If you are making your
dough from scratch, almost any kind of pizza or flatbread recipe will work without any changes to the moisture or protein content. You’ll stretch and shape the dough just as you would if you were baking it in an traditional oven, but to get a really crispy crust, you’ll brush both sides of the dough with olive oil before cooking it over the high heat of the grill.
When it comes to what you put on your pizza, the fewer ingredients, the better.
Sauce lightly, if at all, with scant tablespoons of marinara, pesto, garlic paste or simply olive oil. Small balls of mozzarella cheese will melt nicely, but don’t use any more than a handful or so of shredded cheese, if you go that route.
Most vegetables will need to be cooked first. In the case of broccoli, squash, eggplant or onions, you could sear them on the grill first and then add on top of the dough after the flip. If you don’t mind vegetables with a bit of a crunch left in them, just slice or chop them thinly before cooking directly on top of the dough.
For the beet and feta pizza included with this story, I used roasted beets from my community-supported agriculture box; boiled or roasted potatoes, sliced thin, would be just as good.
Arugula-topped pizzas are so impressive at restaurants like Mandola’s or Enoteca and are easily mimicked in the hands of a cook who thought to buy a few slices of prosciutto at the grocery store and has a bag of frisee, escarole, mizuna, watercress or mustard greens in her fridge.
Because I don’t have or necessarily want a piz- za stone, I like the grilling technique from Elizabeth Karmel and Bob Blumer’s recently expanded book “Pizza on the Grill: 100+ Feisty Fire-Roasted Recipes for Pizza & More” (The Taunton Press, $17.95): Cook for 90 seconds to four minutes over direct heat, flip, add toppings, and finish on the cooler side of the grill.
(I also don’t have a dedicated pizza peel, but I use a small cutting board and just make smaller pizzas, which are more manageable to handle anyway.)
With recipes for pita, focaccia, sandwiches and bruschetta, Karen Adler and Judith Fertig’s new book, “Patio Pizzeria,” covers far more than traditional pizza, but it shows you just how versatile a grill can be for baking.
The key to success with grill-baking any kind of dough is getting the grill nice and hot, because every time you lift the lid, heat escapes and extends the cooking time. Woodfired ovens at traditional pizzerias can run as hot as 900 degrees, but home cooks needn’t go higher than 500 or 600 degrees if you’re working on a high-powered grill.
Move the heating source to one side of the grill, which will give you a cooler workspace to move the crust if it starts to cook too fast on the direct heat side. Use long-handled tongs to flip the dough after the first side cooks and to move the pizza around to adjust for uneven heating.
It might take a try or two to get the technique down, but once you eat a perfectly crisp, lightly browned and smoky crust from your own grill, it might be awhile before burgers get another invite to the party.