Food Post 3 of 3: Charcoal Grilled Pizza

Sunday we tried something we'd heard about but never done ourselves: grilled pizza. What's the big deal about grilled pizza? The wood-fired oven flavor, and the sheer challenge. The next time I do it, my own personal challenge is to not drop the F-bomb. It's a good thing I had a little extra dough to try one crust first. Needless to say, it did not work as beautifully as imagined when draped directly on the grill grates. It made some tasty grilled if horribly misshapen bread, though. We enlisted the help of a perforated pizza pan to at least get the dough round onto the grill and solidified so that it could then be flipped and topped.



Not the most appetizing view. Once flipped, it was better but I think the nice dark stripes of grill grate marks are a little more classically attractive than polka-dots.

The heat starts out intense and then dies away, so adjusting and turning is a constant necessity. And kind of a nuisance. We blackened the bottoms of the first two pizzas.

After we grilled both sides, we topped the pizzas with tomato sauce, fried pepperoni (I love it when it gets frizzled and crisp, and you get rid of all that nasty orange grease that way), provolone and mozarella cheeses, marinated artichoke hearts, caramelized onions, portabella mushrooms, parmesan cheese, and some chopped fresh herbs. Then they go back onto the grill for a few more minutes until the cheese melts. After all that, the end result tasted pretty good. I'd be willing to try this again.