Pizza Triumph

This week I had a plan.  Pizzas.  Fancy pizzas.  I made a DELICIOUS slow-fermenting whole-wheat pizza dough based on a Peter Reinhart recipe from “American Pie.”  Hey, look, an endorsement opportunity.  If you like breads or pizza or baking in general – go out to your library or bookstore or do some good internet sleuthing and get some Peter Reinhart materials.  You may recall that I made some delicious breads a while back from one of his books…. Every single bread and or pizza recipe I have tried of his has turned out fantastic.  You just really need to read his stuff before you ever make bread or pizza again.  These dough rounds were easily the most beautiful dough I’ve ever made.  Just perfectly supple and soft, but not sticky at all.  And they tasted awesome.

Okay Okay, enough with the gushing.  I made two types of pizzas:

Caramelized Onion and Sauteed Mushroom with Fontina Cheese

Pear, Fig, Arugula, and Goat Cheese w/ Balsamic Dressing.  Yes, I do realize that the second pizza is really a salad on top of a pizza crust.  Get into it!

The grilling method is simple:

1. flour the rolled-out dough so that it doesn’t stick
2. slip it onto a hot grill and grill 3-4 minutes until slightly puffed up and browning on the bottom.
3. Remove the dough and arrange the toppings on the cooked side.
4. Put the pies back onto the grill, over a medium-to-low heat, and close the cover (make sure the vents are open).  Let it cook another 3-4 minutes until the toppings are melty and hot, and the bottoms are cooked.

For the salad pizza, don’t put the arugula on until you’ve taken the pizza off the grill.  Its nice if the arugula wilts down a tiny bit from the heat of the pizza, but you don’t want it to be all mushy.

The trick to grilling pizza is to make sure your pizza dough isn’t too sticky, to have a super thin crust, and not too heavy toppings.  If you are using a charcoal grill instead of gas, just pile the charcoal high on one side and not high on the other so you can have a hot side and a not-so-hot side for cooking.

The end result will be a delicious pizza, with a crisp & chewy flavorful crust and the topping combinations are limitless – I like mixing sweet and savory on pizza (pineapple, onion, and coconut-pesto), or really traditional pies with lots of garlic and tomato goodness.

Question for my omnivorous friends and readers – I’ve been thinking about trying to slice up some seitan as a pizza topping, my seitan recipe is probably most comparable to chicken in the meat world – if you were going to make a pizza with chicken on top, what else would you put with it?