Grilled pizza experiments this weekend, using Mark Bittman’s pizza dough recipe from How to Cook Everything. This one is just canned Romas (hand crushed), grated mozzarella cheese, prosciutto and arugula. The other one we did was nectarine, chopped Russian red kale, prosciutto and goat cheese. It tasted great, but did not photograph well, since the kale got a little, um, well done.
Learnings so far:
1. Par-grilling is key. Give the dough a minute or two on both sides before topping it. It seems obvious in retrospect, but made a huge difference in the final product. We had to throw the first one in the broiler to finish, defeating the purpose of not turning on the oven.
2. Have all your toppings ready. There‘s no time for, oops, forgot to grate the cheese.
3. Manage your heat. We cranked it up to 600F on our gas grill to start, but still haven’t quite gotten the perfect topping temp down, so far it’s between 300-400, but depends on the toppings.
4. Use a peel if you have one, or at the very least a large metal turner. In a panic, I flipped the first crust with tongs since the peel was on its way out with dough for the second pizza. Tongs = tearing.
Update 7/31, 2:50 pm: We put the tomatoes and mozzarella on while the crust was on the grill and gave it a couple of minutes to cook/melt. Added the prosciutto just before it came off and topped w/ arugula back in the kitchen.
