Grilled Pizzas!

I love pizza, Helen loves pizza, everybody loves the pizza! Fortunately, there are a lot of good pizza joints out there, but I always feel bad in my wallet and my belly because when its all said and done, a pizza is around $20 and has about 20 lbs of grease. My belly can't handle that much grease anymore, unless that is, its to recover after a night of heavy drinking (which I don't do all that much anymore).

So, pizza, good. Buying pizza from a joint, not always so good. Which leads us to.... Pizzas cooked on a grill!

Helen and I have indulged ourselves and guests a couple of times with these killer concoctions (I kinda wish concoctions started with a 'k,' as I'm a sucker for cheap alliteration). Its all pretty straight forward - the key is making sure that your pizza holds together on the grill, so its all about the dough. I've done pizzas on the grill with dough bought from a pizza joint - just ask them to buy some dough, most places will oblige. Lately though, we've been making our own dough, using a slightly modified bread recipe (I like to throw semolina flour in).

Once you've got your dough, and spread it out all nice and good, the key is to spread some olive oil on it and grill both sides quickly on the grill to give it some strength to hold all the nice toppings you're gonna put on it. After that, just load up your crusts with tasty goodness. Helen and I typically don't use a sauce, we just layer some nice fresh tomato slices on, and they soften up nicely on the grill.

Once you've added about 5lbs worth of toppings, you're good to go. Just take your pizza to the hot coal contraption, gingerly transfer it to the grill, and close it up to make sure your toppings get nice and cooked. If you've got a second level on your grill, that can be really handy to make sure that the underside of your pizza doesn't get burned. If you don't have a second level, you'll want to put the pizzas away from the center of the grill where you've got your coals, and rotate it regularly to get an even bottom crust. If you're lucky, your pizza ends up looking like this: