you’re basking in sunlight. You’re rocking a novelty American flag tank top. And your
fictional golden retriever, Johnny Rico, is doing backflips to impress your cute neighbor who was drawn to the intoxicating smoky aroma coming from your yard. Grilling season is the true most wonderful time of the year.
But all too often, we take the road most traveled and relegate our grills to steaks, or burgers, or sausages, forgetting the Wild West, pioneer, messing-around mentality that makes cooking outside so fun. Life’s too short to be basic and obvious. I urge you -- no I challenge you -- to get weird and throw some pizza on the grill this summer.
Grilling pizza isn’t easy, but nothing worth the effort (except for Easy Mac) ever is. The difficulty of pulling off a perfectly grilled pizza is what makes the end result so rewarding, and when you taste that deliciously char-kissed crust, you forget about any of the hardships along the way.
A quick primer on grilled pizza theory: When a typical pizza goes into an oven, it’s being cooked with indirect heat, which is to say it’s the hot air around it that’s actually doing the cooking. Obviously, grills use direct heat. This seems like a problem. However, since pizzas are typically cooked at such a high heat -- a thin-crust Neapolitan might be in an 850 degree oven for only 90 seconds -- your grill is almost better suited to create those conditions than a standard home oven.
As long as you know the tricks to employ and the traps to avoid, you can have some beautifully charred pizza in no time. I’ve outlined the three different paths to grilled pizza success, all of which have their own merits and pitfalls. It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, except all of the endings have pizza, so there are no wrong choices here.
Note: All the pizzas were made with fresh dough using this recipe, but using pre-made dough from the grocery store is totally acceptable. If you’re making pizza for a group, you should totally lie and tell them you made it from scratch. https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/grillist-grilled-pizza-on-the-grill/food-and-drink
