Someone mentioned the other day (in the Ray's thread, of all places) that the only way to cook a pizza at home is on a pizza stone.

Well, I have another way, and it's on the grill.

I am a little embarrassed to say where I first saw this, but I'm sure many of you do it already and probably got it from the same guy. (Hint: he's in town this week.) The basic method is thus: Heat up your gas grill (charcoal- or wood-grilled has more flavor, but getting the heat right is tricky). Roll out pizza as you would before putting it on a pizza stone, but in an oval or rectangular shape that will fit well on your grill. Oil up one side with olive oil, sprinkle on some S+P on same side, and put that side down on the hot grill. (Depending on how hot your gas grill gets, you may want to turn it down to medium at this point. I'd make or buy a couple extra doughs your first time out to be safe.)

While the oiled side is cooking, oil up the top side and do the same S+P routine, then close the lid. Peek under the dough with some tongs and when it's done, flip it over (I usually do this with two hands, using my grill spatula and tongs). Immediately get your toppings on the cooked side, close the lid, and turn the heat down a little more. (For toppings, I like to make pestos -- mint, basil, or cilantro -- and throw on some chevre, mixed greens, and -- depending on the company -- anchovies. Or I make a mushroom sauce, an idea stolen from Rustico, and throw on some mozzerella and parsley. As Lou Reed once said, the possibilities are endless.) Check in at regular intervals with the bottom of your crust and you'll be good to go.

Thanks to the high heat of the grill and the liberal application of olive oil, the crust crisps up very nicely on the outside but stays soft and doughy on the inside. I've had very good results using this method, and it's a quick, easy way to make pizza in the summer without heating your kitchen oven up to 500 degrees.

I have done this (learned it in a cooking class that I took) and think its great. If your grill is nice and hot you don't need much, if any, oil as the dough will crisp nicely on its own. An important point, that you mentioned, is that the toppings should already be cooked before placing them on top.

These would be fun at the next picnic.

I've always wanted to try this, but have been intimidated by the burn factor. Plus, my dough making skills are sorely lacking.

Anyone have a dough recipe?

From mktye --click

The most recent issue of Cook's Illustrated holds forth on this topic, and has a dough recipe, but the orientation is to get a good crust from a home oven, not the grill. They modify the normal dough recipe, incorporating 1/3 cake flour, to get a result from a home oven at 500 degrees which is similar to that from an 800 degree commercial oven. I've been playing with it, with mixed results , but without using a pizza stone--need to get one.

That recipe as written makes a rather slack dough and it would be quite challenging to get onto a grill with both it and your sanity intact. I normally bake it on a piece of parchment on a stone in the oven, but using the parchment trick on a grill would result in an ashy mess!

You can still use the recipe and just add more flour to make a firmer dough, or use the following focaccia recipe (which makes a better tasting crust anyway). It makes enough dough for a couple of large medium-thick crust pizzas.

FOCACCIA
Makes two ~10”x18”x2” pieces

1 cup unbleached, all-purpose flour
4½ teaspoons (2 packages) dry yeast
1 cup water, hot from the tap

~4 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons salt
1¼ cups water, hot from the tap
¼ cup olive oil

In a mixing bowl or the bowl of a mixer, mix the 1 cup flour with the yeast and then add the water. Beat vigorously to mix together well, cover the bowl with plastic wrap and allow the sponge to ferment for 1 to 2 hours at room temperature.

Mix in 3 cups of the flour, the salt, water and oil, then let the dough rest for 10 minutes for the gluten to start to develop. Knead the dough by hand or with a mixer with the dough hook for 15 minutes adding the reserved flour as needed to form a soft (think playdough-like softness), but not overly sticky dough. If using a food processor, mix with the steel blade for 10 seconds, add 1 cup additional flour (or more if necessary) and process an additional 30 seconds. Place the dough in a large bowl (or back in the mixing/mixer bowl), cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough rise for 1 to 1½ hours or until doubled in size. Punch the down the dough and let it rise again for 1 hour. Punch down the dough again, divide it in half, put each piece into a large oiled zip-loc bag and put in the refrigerator for 24 to 36 hours.

When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 450 degrees or heat grill and take the dough out of the refrigerator, remove it from the bags onto a lightly-floured surface, cover with plastic wrap and let sit for ~1 hour. Shape and bake with your desired method. (And, as CI does with the grill, I suggest partially cooking the crust before adding the toppings even when baking in an oven.)

I haven't made pizza dough in years, though it's time I did. The dough I use on the grill is already prepared, either from Trader Joe's or the Italian Store (the latter is better, but I haven't tried Vace's yet). This saves a lot of time, the dough works fine if you allow it to rest at room temperature (I give it an hour if I can), and it's easy to have a few extra on hand when they're 90 cents each. I also should've noted that I usually make my pizzas on the grill pretty thin -- this is more of a flatbread-style pizza than a true Neopolitan pizza, but it works.

I just moved to a new apartment about a month ago, and can FINALLY grill legally on my balcony. So I bought a Weber 22.5" and have since gone a little grill crazy - using it pretty much every night since moving. I've always been tempted to try the whole grilled pizza thing. It always seemed to me, though, that it would make more sense to put the dough on a stone on the grill rather than directly on the grate.

Trouble is, I can only get one pizza at a time on my 22.5", but I can get TWO in the regular oven. That's usually enough to do about 10 pizzas in an hour. I suppose I could use the grill to do a THIRD, but running between the kitchen and the balcony sounds a little hectic to me. I can see setting myself on fire in the mad dash to avoid over-crisping.

Here's the dough recipe I use. Clearly it's veeeeeeeeeery different from most pizza recipes you see out there in that it uses milk instead of water and a lot of sugar. It's generally a crowd pleaser, though, so I'm not changing it

1 1/8 cups all purpose flour
1 1/8 cups bread flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup skim milk
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon yeast
½ tablespoon honey
½ tablespoon molasses
½ tablespoon 100% pure maple syrup - none of that 2% maple + 98% corn syrup bullshit
1 tablespoon corn meal

Heat olive oil and milk together in a saucepan until slightly warmer than the temperature you would take a shower in. Mix in honey, molasses, syrup, and yeast.

Let mixture sit for five minutes or until yeast has started to foam.

In bowl, combine flour and salt. Add yeast mixture and stir until the dough forms a ball.

Knead well by hand or using a Kitchen-Aid dough hook.

Coat dough in olive oil and cover with plastic wrap or a wet towel. Let rise in a warm, humid place for ninety minutes or until doubled in size.

Punch dough down, and divide into balls five inches in diameter (seriously, I looked up the conversion from diameter of a sphere to diameter of a pizza-shaped cylinder... it works). Let the balls rise, covered, a bit longer until nice and spongy. At this point, the dough can be frozen or refrigerated. Just make sure it's back up to room temp or warmer before working with it.

Roll out (or, if you're more than 50% pure-blood Italian, TOSS) as thinly as possible. Brush olive oil on dough. Using a pizza peel coated in corn meal, place on a pizza stone heated in the oven at maximum temperature. Top with your favorite toppings, and bake until the crust is golden brown - about 10 minutes.

I'd be interested to hear what any professional bakers have to say about my recipe.

Where did you get this recipe?

Short answer: Practice. Long answer: I experimented with many basic pizza dough recipes I found on-line a few years ago. I liked the results I got with milk more than the result with water. I played around with different fats - olive oil works the best, I've found. The sugar is where I went really nuts. First I just used honey, then I started adding molasses from a tip from my father. For a few months I was on a maple kick, working the syrup into as many savory dishes as I thought it would work in - including pizza. Plus, since the best pizza in the world is made in Vermont*, it seemed natural. I ended up tweaking the amounts a little (hence the odd 1 1/8th), and ended up with a pretty consistent, easy to work with dough.


*I am of course talking about Vermont Flatbread. You've probably seen it in the freezer section of your local Whole Foods, but let me tell you that there is NO experience on Earth, especially for a pizza lover, like eating one of George's masterpieces right after it's taken out of his hand-built, mud and brick, wood fired oven. They're as much a product of technique, experience, and spiritual magic as they are of the recipe.

I suppose you never tried a non-sugar dough with an overnight cold ferment. That is a great way to make some tasty dough. While I have never had the pizza from Vermont, it would be hard to convince me that it is the best pizza in the world.

I will try this at some point, but I am going to stick with Reinhart's recipe for tried and true.

Reinhart rocks...his cold ferment brings out a great nutty flavor in the wheat, and also got me to stop adding sugar. Departing a bit from the VPN recipe, I still use a mix of tipo 00 and softer flour, and include a bit of olive oil, as I have trouble preventing a lean tipo 00 dough from becoming tougher than I'd like.

Thanks for the detailed instructions, CI...I've been meaning to try grilling the dough, after both Raichlen and the Dean & DeLuca cookbooks raved about it, but haven't worked out how to keep it from sticking to the unconventional grates on my TEC.

What would happen if sugar WERE used in a cold ferment?

I guess you really enjoy sweet doughs. I obviously don't when it comes to pizza.

The yeast would grow more quickly and not elicit the same flavors that occur in the longer slower growth cycle. This technique is commonly used for many old style breads (mktye, correct me if I am wrong) and produce a depth of flavor that is not seen in quick rise recipes. I also wonder if some sugar would remain, making the dough sweet, although not as sweet as your original recipe.

I have made simple doughs with just water, flour, yeast, and salt and have let some ferment quickly and others slowly and the difference in flavor is amazing.

Yeast are pretty amazing bugs and produce a range of flavors (good and bad) depending on things such as temperature, food, and strain of yeast used. This is put to good use in beer making, but that is for another thread.

I enjoy the flavor imparted by the sweeteners more so than the sweetness itself. I'll defintely have to try the sugarless cold ferment, though. Maybe I'll experiment with cold fermenting sweetened and unsweetened dough. Thanks for the tip!

I tend to agree about the sweetness thing -- leave it out of my pizza dough.

I plan on experimenting with more dough recipes soon, and my wife and I have been talking about doing a pizza on the grill. So this is really useful info.

Question though....yeast - which do you use and where do you get it? We've only used this dry yeast you buy at the grocery store, Fleischmann's(?), with only OK results. I'm looking to expand my yeast horizons and would prefer any sugegstions.

Also, anyone ever try to 'proof' the dough in the oven? My Miele oven comes with a proofing setting specifically designed for doughs... Thoughts?

I have used Fleischmann's but just ran out and have moved onto SAF Instant, which give good results.

Proofing in the oven does not make much sense to me (my oven does it also). Once your dough is proofed you then have to wait for the oven to raise to temperature which take a bit of time. Not to mention that if you are using a stone you want to heat it for at least 30 minutes if not an hour. Bythat time the dough will be over proofed.

If your kitchen is on the cool side, just take the dough upstairs where the house is usually warmer.

I also use SAF -- the "red" for regular dough and the "gold" for sweet/sour/rich dough (it really does make a noticable difference in rising times).

I nearly always buy it from King Arthur Flour and store it in my freezer in a well-sealed container.

One thing to keep in mind with the instant yeasts is that they are designed to get going quickly and if you proof them in water with just a bit of flour and/or sugar for a period even as brief as 10 minutes, you can actually starve the little guys to death. I never do an initial proof with dry yeast (unless I know it is beyond its expiration date or has been abused with high temperature storage) -- I just toss the yeast in with the other dry ingredients, add the liquid and let it go to work.

I've used Fleischmann's because that's what's available locally, but it does seem a little less reliable than the Red Star I'm using now (which, like SAF, is a LeSaffre product). A two-pound vacuum-packed brick of the stuff sells for something like $3 at Costco.

Two different definitions are in use here. You're thinking of proofing dough. To proof yeast, especially activated dry yeast, is to mix it into a small amount of liquid of appropriate temperature, typically with flour or sugar for nutrients, to kickstart its growth cycle and to permit you to observe its viability before committing your dough to it. If you don't see adequate activity, try fresher yeast.


It's granulated, just like the packets and jars, and measures easily with a spoon. I store mine in a cold part of the refrigerator, but that's a leftover habit from brewing days...would it be better off in the freezer?

Thanks ol ironstomach!

I think the oven setting to 'proof' is for the dough itself. Hence, creating a nice warm spot for the dough to proof and expand once the yeast is in it. I think.

Last-minute pizza grilling question!

I'm about to grill pizza for the first time. I'm using a pizza stone, so don't try to talk me out of it.

My question is, I have a Weber 22." I'm using jumbo lump hardwood charcoal. How much will I need? One chimney starter worth, or two? Should it be arranged directly under my 18" pizza stone, or around the sides?

Thanks! I hope someone gets back to me before 6

One chimney's worth oughta do it. Two is too hot to cook damn near anything on that size grill. Also, doesn't it kinda defeat the purpose of grilling a pizza if you use a pizza stone?

Heh... I suppose this isn't what people mean when they say "grilled pizza," is it? Really I'm just using the grill to try and achieve the same effect/flavor one would get with a real wood-fired brick oven. Any tips?

I tried hauling mud and clay up from the creek to my fourth-flour apartment, but the management gave me some earful about zoning.

Another thing to consider is that you might crack the pizza stone when you put it on the fire. You may want to warm it up to 400 degrees or so in your oven before you put it on the grill rack. Hopefully you have something heat proof to carry it over to the grill.

I speak from experience as I once used a pizza stone as a "fireproof" stand to start another batch of coals in a chimney when I was smoking some pork butt. The stone cracked and the chimney put a nice little charred circle on my brother's backyard deck. I was lucky to not set fire to a big pile of dry leaves below the deck. This may have been because all the heat being was in one portion of the stone, but it could have been due to it going from about 75 degrees to 500 in a few seconds.

Grilled pizza is putting the dough directly on the grate.

Anyway, did you do it? Results better than the oven?

I did. Problem was, the stone was too hot. Or rather, the stone was the perfect temperature and the AIR was too cool.

I ended up with a slightly burned bottom and slightly undercooked toppings.

I wonder if using hardwood charcoal just made everything too hot. In any case, the flavor was not appreciably improved over the more convenient oven. Next time I might try the direct-on-grate method.

Did you keep the lid on while the stone was heating up? That might help to keep the air above the pizza a bit warmer, but I don't think it the little webber would ever get hot enough. Do the flip on the grill and then finish in the oven. Just remember to cook the toppings first.

Yeah, I kept the lid on. The stone itself was 700F over most of the surface. Way hotter than what I get in the oven. I guess it's just losing too much heat when I take the lid off to put the pizza on.

I did the pizza stone on the grill a couple of weekends ago and what I found that worked well for me was to cook the dough on one side for a couple of minutes and flip it over so that I was topping the precooked side. I slid this back onto the stone and ended up with a thoroughly cooked pizza. As for toppings, my onions and mushrooms were thinly sliced and raw but peppers and eggplant I grilled ahead of time.

Not sure if this belongs in the pizza thread or the grilling thread, so I'll put it in both (don't kill me, Don).

Wood-fired pizza on a Weber 22" kettle. Can it be done? How? A thousand gold pieces to the man or woman who gives me the answer!

I have been making pizza on the Gas Grill for over 10 years.

I start with dough from Trader Joe's. At a $1 a ball it has true price performance. Especially since my boys eat the pizza.

Get grill hot. Usually 15 minutes on High.

Cook on grill for 2-3 minutes. Should not be burnt.

Take off using pizza pell and place ingrediants on cooked side.

My boys favor Dom Pepinos pizza Sauce and a Mozerella/Romano blend.

Back on grill for another 3-4 minutes.. The cheese will melt and and uncooked side should be done.


This is a regular item at our house for my teenage boys. Very simple and good. It might be harder using non-gar grill but the results should be the same.

Easy, but they are not cooked exactly like normal pies. The toppings to be put on the pizza, minus the cheese, should be cooked completely before placing them on top. Any sauce should be hot when placed on top.

• Make your dough, portion out enough for a 12" pie, shape and place on peel sprinkled with cornmeal.
• Oil up the grill and slide the dough in one motion. If it does not go on perfectly don't try and move it as you will tear it apart.
• When the bottom is cooked slightly crisped flip. It will easily come off the grill.
• Continue cooking until done. The dough will be slightly undercooked at this point.
• Cover with desired toppings and finish with the cover on the grill. You might need to slide it over so that it is not directly over the hot coals. The idea at this point is to melt the cheese and heat up the toppings.
• Enjoy.

Note: The fire should be med-high in heat. You can test with smaller pieces of dough to find what works on your grill.

I guess this belongs more in the grilling area, then.

I've only ever used charcoal. For wood, do I just buy wood and burn it in the grill? How much should I use? Do I put the pizza on instantly or let it burn down to coals?

Basically I want to recreate a big brick wood-burning oven in a Weber kettle.

We use the pizza stone on our gas grill. We put the stone on the cold grill and heat them both up at the same time. We roll out the dough on a piece of parchment paper, top the pie, then just slide it on and off the stone. We let the stone cool down on the grill too - thus no breaking during the heating/cooling cycle. The edges of the parchment paper get burned, but nothing that influences the pizza. With the lid on the grill, the crust and toppings get done just right. Of course, you need a pizza peel to get the pizza on/off the stone. We've found that our splatter screen works just fine (as long as the plastic handle doesn't come in contact with the grill, of course).

Never going to happen as those big brick ovens cook via the heat that is stored in the brick. The fire is there to keep the grill hot for a long period of time. The only thing you can do with any grill is make a grilled pizza, but it will get some smokey flavor.

But even the best wood fired brick oven pizza I've had does not really have asmokey flavor. The smoke goes up the chiminey

Correct, but doing the grilled thing on a Weber will get bit of it.

Two things to add here. First of all, this may be completely illegal and probably dangerous but last time I cooked pizzas I rigged the latch on my oven to keep from locking when I was in "clean" mode. I think that the clean cycle got a good 300 degrees hotter than my maximum allowed 550. At that temp it only took about a minute to char the bottom and the top a bit. The last half of my pizzas were damn near 2amys quality. A couple of things I have learned, I put the pizza stone as close to the top as I can while still being able to move the pizza in and out of the oven. When I kept it at the bottom, the stone would be much hotter than the air and the bottom would crust up way before the top. If I waited for the top to brown the bottom would be rock hard. Putting the stone at the top has helped even out the top/bottom cooking times. I don't like brushing olive oil on the crust because I feel like it affects the rise. I don't seem to get as much poof out of the crust when I do this. Instead I just sprinkle some sea salt all around the outer ring. No one leaves their crusts on the plate anymore.

Ok on the grilling pizza I don't think you will ever get results like an oven. The problem is that as soon as you lift the lid all your hot air disappears. I think the air needs to actually be hotter than the stone to make a perfect pizza. This may be completely crazy, way more work than it is worth and wildly unsafe but what about setting up a rig for two stones? Drill four small holes in the lid of your grill and bolt on some small metal hooks. Get four small c-clamps and put one on each corner of a pizza stone, attach wire to each one with a small loop or hook at the other end. Use enough wire that the stone would hang 4-5 inches above the grate. Whenever you wanted to do a pizza you just attach the top stone to the hooks before you preheat. Also I disagree with whoever said one chimney of coals. When cooking pizza the hotter the better. Heck I might use three. If it has to cook for over 4-5 minutes it is too cool in my opinion. If you preheat both of those stones with three chimney's of coals for 30-45 minutes I would be willing to bet there would be enough residual heat in that top stone to blister the top of the pizza just like a brick oven.

You seem to enjoy cooking outside and want to replicate dishes authentically so why not carve out a section of your backyard and build an oven yourself? You could crank out pizzas, bread, roasts, etc. all day after firing the thing up in the morning as they hold a great deal of heat.

Click.

That is on my list of things to do in my life. I've wanted one ever since I was a kid. Once I move into a permanent home, expect to see a thread started about my efforts

America's Test Kitchen did a pizza on the grill this past weekend using a Weber. They turned out beautiful...not sure about the taste. You might want to check it out to see how they rigged it...seem to recall that they used hardwood charcoal started in a chimney keeping a cool spot to one side. (recipe is here)

Let's talk a little about HEAT.

Big wood burning ovens (forno) WORK. We know they work, and they work for two reasons:

1) The surface of the ovens retains heat. This allows conduction to take place between the bottom of the crust and the oven surface, resulting in a crisp and sturdy crust button.
2) The air in the oven retains heat. This allows convection to do its work - cooking the toppings thoroughly, melting (but not burning) the cheese, and ensuring an even and crisp rise of the crust rim.

For the home cook, #1 is easy to duplicate: pizza stone. There's no question that this WORKS.

#2, though... that's another story. When you open the oven to stick the pie in, all the air flows out. Now you've got a 300 degree oven but a 550 pizza stone. Worst case, you end up with a burnt bottom and undercooked top. The effect is even more pronounced in a grill we're you've got a dedicated heat source at the bottom and tons of heat coming out of the top when you lift the lid.

Does anyone have any strategies for retaining heat, or otherwise duplicating the environment of a commercial or brick pizza oven using a conventional home oven? What about using a convection setting? Or would the fact that most ovens limit the convection setting to 400 degrees tops make it pointless?

Just noticed this post. I've been using their recipe and method for the last two summers with great success. I'll admit that their crust may not taste like traditional crust. To me, it's almost more like a flatbread - it has a nice, slightly chewy texture and a well developed flavour (which I think is thanks to the fact they use bread flour and olive oil in the dough). I crank up the flavour a bit by going heavier on the garlic and herbs and sometimes even adding some hot red chilis to it.

Having the cool spot on the grill is essential to melt the cheese. I cook the bread on the hot side until I get just a little char, then flip, add toppings, move to the cool side of the grill and close the lid. It doesn't take more than a few minutes per side and I've never had a complaint about the results (maybe everyone was being kind...who knows?).

Jeffrey Steingarten has a pretty good story in one of his books where he talks about using the "clean" cycle on an oven to bake pizza (since it gets the temp way hotter than the oven will normally go-- like 700). However, he tried this at a friend's place not knowing that the oven locks during the cleaning cycle (with the pizza inside )

I line my rack with unglazed tiles (too much of a minimalist to store a pizza stone) and preheat for at least 30 minutes at 485 degrees. I find that the hot tiles radiate plenty of heat to keep my oven nice and toasty while I slide a pizza in. My MIL has had problems using this technique only when her dough is too thick or the toppings have been piled on too thick. The mktye trick of making your pizza on parchment and sliding it into the oven with parchment and all also makes for quick and speedy pizza transfers.

Use two pizza stones.

Place the racks containing the stones as close together as you can, but far enough apart so your pizza (or bread) fits between them (if baking bread, be sure to take into account space for the bread to rise) and put your pizza (or bread) on the lower one.

It works like a charm with pizza (and I noticed nearly a 50% increase in oven-spring with my free-form loaves of bread).

(And the only time I ever remove my baking stones from the oven is when I cook macarons -- a lesson I learned the hard way. )

Wow, such a simple solution. I'm totally trying this.

Thanks, guys. I'll definitely try the multiple stone approach. Usually I have two pizzas going at once on two stones anyway - I'll just add a third!

Okay, we've talked about HEATING pizza, let's talk about FREEZING pizza.

I do a cold ferment on my dough, so that means if I want pizza I have to wait at least a day. Sometimes I don't want to wait a day, and it's just as easy to make a triple recipe of dough as it is a single recipe. The question is, what's the best time to freeze the dough/pizza so I have some ready to go when the CRAVING sets in?

1) BEFORE THE RISE
Probably a bad idea.
2) AFTER THE RISE
This is the stage at which you'll find dough frozen at the grocery store. The disadvantage here is that you still have to thaw the dough, let it come to room temperature, shape it, rest it, shape it, rest it, etc. This can take hours. Not good if you want oven fresh pizza on a weeknight.
3) AFTER SHAPING
So the dough is rested and tossed, but still raw. Layer the discs on wax paper. Fits easily in the freezer. Take the frozen dough out, top it, and toss it in the oven.
4) AFTER COOKING
Shape the dough, top the pizza, then toss it in the oven for about half its usual cooking time. Take it out, freeze it. When you want it again, just toss it in the oven!

So... what's the best stage to freeze the pizza? Will you end up with textural or flavor differences at any stage? #4 is obviously the most convenient for reheating, but what do you lose in exchange for convenience? In #3 and #4, should the dough/pizza be thawed before going in the oven, or can the frozen pie go right in?

What say you?

My vote is for #4, but don't top it. Partially bake it until it is set and just starting to color. Remove, cool, wrap well and freeze. Then defrost, top and bake. It works especially well with thin-crust pizzas.

As for defrosting -- I've found that with a thin crust, if you take it out of the freezer when you start to prep your toppings, by the time you slather them on, it is defrosted enough to go in the oven. For thicker crusts, I'd make sure to fully defrost it before topping and baking (pull it out of the freezer when you leave for work in the morning?).