You may have noticed I love to eat pizza, I think I must be making up for all the pizza I missed growing up, which was a lot. Needless to say I have a good amount of catching up to do. This weekend at our friends the Lockhart's house, Walt mentioned they had seen gluten free frozen pizza dough at the store and if he had time he would have made grilled pizza for us. I realized I had that exact dough in the freezer and had been waiting to use it, for what I don't know, but now I knew. Walt explained the basic details of how-to for grilling a pizza while my husband and I both started thinking, me about the ingredients I had in the house and what I would need to add to the grocery list to make this work. And Tim was thinking about how to make all this happen, tools, grill temperature and such.
Upon arriving home, I opened the freezer to find it was a package of Gillian's Foods Frozen Pizza crust, the instructions were pretty simple, defrost in the fridge over night and roll out on a floured surface. Seemed pretty simple to me, and with Walt's instructions and the back up of a few online recipes we were ready to go. I had picked up some mozzarella at the store to go with the tomato paste and pepperoni slices I had waiting in the fridge, we figured keep the toppings simple on the first time through the process to decrease the chance of failure.
I used a mixture of cornmeal and tapioca starch to kneed and roll out the dough on my tupperware pastry mat (I love that thing!) We transferred the dough to a cookie sheet for transport to the grill, and prepped cheese and pepperoni. I put a few tablespoons worth of tomato paste into a bowl for Tim to season as he saw fit, I can tell you salt, pepper, dried oregano and dried basil went into it. Tim grabbed his heavy duty griddle to use on the grill so that we wouldn't end up with a fire scorched slab of dough. He used olive oil to grease the griddle before we put the dough on, and let it heat through until it started to bubble up. At that point he oiled the uncooked side and we flipped the dough, which came out gorgeous! Beautiful grill marks and it just looked crispy. We then got to work spreading a thin coating of the tomato paste over the entire dough and I quickly placed the cheese and pepperoni on top. After that Tim closed the lid on the grill to allow the toppings to heat up and melt a bit. It was probably all of 10 minutes from the time it went on the grill to the time it came off, including oiling, and flipping.
It was DELICIOUS! The crust was perfectly crunchy and tender at the same time. As I said earlier, the toppings were simple and reliable, nothing terribly notable there. But the crust was fantastic, the grill was a perfect was to heat this up nicely, no more oven for us. I may even forgo a few of my take out pizzas to have more grilled pizzas. Now we just have to dream up some more exotic toppings for our next attempt. Which if my pizza appetite continues it won't be long now. I just have to remember where I got that crust from.....hmmmm..... I'll let you know when I find it again.
