semi-homemade grilled pizza

The other night, my sister Laura and I made grilled pizza for dinner, which many people never think of doing. In college, every internship I had was unpaid, but I did manage to walk away with books from every one of them. My first internship was at a magazine and one of my writing jobs was product reviews for things like dietary supplements, organic foods, and cookbooks. One of the cookbooks talked about grilled pizzas — I tried them and I was hooked (the cookbook is currently in our HHE — household effects — en route to Belgium to hang out in storage until we get to Belgrade).

While this particular pizza was homemade in that we put it together and made it ourselves, we made neither the dough nor the sauce from scratch. In the summer, I like making pretty much everything on the grill because unlike making things in the oven, using the grill doesn’t heat up the entire kitchen/house.

To minimize the mess, it is easiest to begin cooking the dough directly on the grill and finish the pizza using a buffer layer of tin foil. This way, the dough has grill marks and a little bit of the grill flavor but cleanup and drippings are kept under control.

Ingredients

• fresh pizza dough (we got ours from our local grocery store)
• sauce (ours was marinara sauce from a local Italian market)
• dried oregano
• fresh mozzarella
• fresh basil
• plum tomatoes
• olive oil
• sea salt

Directions 

1. Preheat the grill and prepare ingredients: slice the tomatoes and the mozzarella, tear up the basil, and separate the pizza dough into manageable personal pizza sizes, making the sections roughly the same thinness throughout.
2. Coat with olive oil and place on grill, olive oil side down, for 1-2 minutes. While on grill, coat the other side with olive oil.
3. Flip the dough and cook for 1-2 minutes more. Remove and place on tin foil.
4. Spread sauce, sprinkle with dried herbs, spread mozzarella pieces, and place tin foil on grill.
5. Sprinkle with tomato slices and fresh basil pieces, drizzle with olive oil, and allow pizza to cook with grill closed, roughly 10 more minutes.
6. Add a sprinkle of sea salt, peel pizza off the tin foil, and enjoy!

Note: Make sure you don’t skimp on the olive oil or the dough will stick to the grill and/or tin foil!