Pizzas on the Grill

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Emely's Grilled Pizza Recipe

Pizzas on the Grill

The grill’s high-intensity heat sears the crust, melts the cheese, and creates the best all around pizza-mostly because a grill efficiently replicates the high-heat, low-moisture environment of commercial pizza ovens. Grilled pizza is fun to make, and easier than you’d think, especially if your grill has a cover. Wood fires are the trickiest fuel to control, but impart a great flavor to the crust; gas grills are naturally the easiest, and charcoal lies somewhere in between. You want a fire that is hot enough to brown the dough, but not so hot that it scorches it before the interior cooks; you should be able to hold your hand a few inches above the fire for 3 or 4 seconds. An ideal setup is one where part of the grill is hot and part of it cool.

On a gas grill, this means setting one side to “high” and the other to “low,” or some similar arrangement. With a charcoal grill, just build your fire on one side; use the hot side for the initial browning of the dough, the cool side to heat the toppings.

The process is straightforward: Grill the dough on one side, just enough to firm it up and brown it a bit, then flip it (for small pizzas, use tongs; otherwise a spatula aided by your fingers does the trick) and add toppings. If you want the toppings to become very hot, cover the grill. If you don’t care whether they actually cook, but just warm up a bit, you can leave the grill open.

It’s especially important when grilling to keep pizza toppings to a minimum. Fully loaded grilled pizzas won’t cook properly and will be impossible to handle. One way around this is to grill pizzas with one or two ingredients, then add more when you remove them from the fire.

There are two Ways to Grill a Pizza

1. On a pizza stone. A stone is placed over indirect, moderate (or medium) heat; the topped pie is then placed directly on the stone and cooked with the grill lid closed.

2. On the grate. The formed but not-yet-topped crust is laid directly on the grate and (most important) over low-not medium or high-heat. It is grilled for 2 minutes, then flipped to be topped right on the grill. The pie continues to bake another 5 to 8 minutes; the exact timing depends on how many toppings have been added.
I advocate for the first option. First off, you can load a pizza more thickly with toppings when you bake it on a stone because they have time to heat through and meld. In other words, using a stone lets you use more cheese. It seems like a no-brainer.
Secondly, there’s little chance of burning the crust. A low- heat setting can be difficult to maintain in a charcoal grill and the crust will burn quite quickly if the heat inches up even slightly.
Since we advocate for the stone over indirect heat, these pies are technically barbecued, not grilled. In culinary parlance, grilling is when you cook something directly over the heat; barbecuing is when you cook the food to the side of the heat source-that is, indirectly.
One caveat: a stone must be preheated 30 to 45 minutes. A cool stone will lead to a soggy, underdone crust and burned toppings. Do not shortchange this step. Indirect cooking on a gas grill: First set up the grill for moderate (or medium) heat, which runs about 450°F. On a gas grill, this is no problem: set the dial and watch the temperature gauge. If you don’t have a gauge, buy an oven thermometer and hang it inside the grill to get an accurate reading.

Heat only half of the grill back or front; one side or the other. Unless you have a large grill, it’s almost impossible to heat an area that will be completely separate from your pizza stone. If there is some overlap between the heat source and the stone or the tray, make sure that overlap occurs at the side of the stone or tray. If your burners run front to back, turn the top and bottom burners to medium and let the grill heat up for 30 to 40 minutes with the lid closed. The stone or the baking tray should be set so that its center is over the unheated center burner of the grill. If your burners run side to side, turn on only those at one side, setting the stone or the baking sheet on the other side, the unheated section of the grill grate.

In any event, if there’s overlap between the burner and the stone or baking sheet, consider rotating the pizza halfway through baking to ensure it gets done evenly. On a baking sheet or pizza tray, this is no problem-just rotate the sheet or tray. On a stone, work with the peel, getting the firmed up if still underbaked pizza onto it and gently turning the pizza 90 degrees before again placing it over on the stone and closing the lid.

3. Indirect cooking on a charcoal grill: Since you’ll need to have the heat to the side of the pizza stone, you must either build the coal bed along the outside edge or perimeter of the coal rack with quick- lighting charcoal, or you must build a coal bed in the center of the rack and then rake those hot, red, ashed coals to the rack’s perimeter so the stone can sit in the center of the upper grill rack without any direct heat under it. If you use a chimney, make sure the vents are partially open so the coals become quite hot but gray with ash. Once the coals are in place for indirect cooking, place the stone in the center of the grill (again, not directly over the heat source). Because the stone must heat for 30 to 45 minutes, have more coals at the ready, adding them two or three at a time to keep the heat constant.
Preheating a charcoal grill is a less exact science than doing the same for a gas grill. Moderate heat means that you can hold your hand about 6 inches above the coals for about 4 seconds before you must move it for fear of getting burned. Of course, you can also buy an oven thermometer and hang it off the upper grill rack to determine the exact temperature. Again, moderate heat should register about 450°F.