How To Make Pizza On The Flat Top Grill

The first question is … is it even possible to make pizza on a grill ? The answer is yes! Of course you can make pizza on the Flat Top griddle! It gets a little messy, but the fun far outweighs the mess. It may not end up picture perfect, but do you want a pretty pizza or one that is fun and delicious?!

Pizza on the griddle tonight was maybe our best yet.

Here are a couple of things that made it the best pizza ever that really don’t have anything to do with the flat top and will make all of your home made pizza’s better.

• Caramelized Onions (a lot of them!)

• Don’t worry, they reduce down into a gooey deliciousness.

• Extra Thin Crust Slathered liberally with Garlic Ghee. Yes, I know it’s not round, but transferring the dough from it’s perfectly rolled out state onto the flat top grill is a bit of a challenge. Being not-round gives it an artsy rustic look :)

• Home made sauce made with San Marzano tomatoes and garlic butter Ghee is a nice touch.

Here’s how we made pizza on our flat top grill

Although, as mentioned above, you can use these techniques indoors and in an oven, doing it on the flat top is so much more rewarding and fun and in many ways easier. My Grand-Girls seeing how to make pizza from scratch, outside, and on the grill, was priceless! If you care to know, we are doing it on a Camp Chef 600 4-Burner Flat Top Propane Gas Grill - FTG600.

So lets get started. You’ll need all of the regular pizza ingredients:

1. Choose your favorite dough recipe.
2. Choose a jar of sauce that you like or make it yourself.
3. Choose your toppings.

Some of the tricks to making pizza on the flat top

• Since we are not using an oven, the plan is to assemble the parts (dough, sauce, and toppings) pre-cooked and already up to temperature. If the dough, sauce and toppings are already hot, we need to only worry about how to get the cheese melted.

• Slather the rolled out dough with spice infused olive oil. Infused Olive Oil Instructions below)

• Cook one side of the crust while heating the sauce and pepperoni off to the side.

• Flip the crust

• Add sauce and toppings and cover with a lid. Give it a squirt of water under the cover to generate some cheese-melting steam.

Brief Dough-Making Rant Before we get started, I need to rant a bit. The fancy chefs go on and on about using a scale to get the flour and water proportions correct. But then, they say if the dough is a little sticky add some water. So why did I so carefully weigh the ingredients if you’re going to fudge it at the end anyway ? End of Dough Rant

Easy Pizza Dough Recipe

• 2 cups of flour
• A teaspoon or so of salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoons of yeast (or one packet)
• 3/4 cups warm water
• 2 Tbsp olive oil (optional)

We do enough baking around our house that we always have a jar of yeast in the refrigerator. Although packets are convenient, buying yeast by the jar will save you a little money.

Add the yeast to the warm water to give it a little head start. In the “old days” the practice was to proof the yeast for a few minutes to make sure it was alive. If it makes you feel better, wait a minute or two to see if it starts to bubble and look alive. In all of my travels, I’ve never once seen “bad” yeast.

Add the salt, olive oil and flour. Start mixing it in the bowl until it starts to hold it’s shape, then dump on to the counter for proper kneading. Knead it nicely; If it needs water or flour … give it some. More than likely, it will be sticky… add a little flour but for now, it’s best to leave it a bit sticky.

After a couple minutes of kneading, let it rest for for five or so minutes. Letting it rest will allow the flour to properly hydrate. Knead the bread for another five minutes, adding flour in tiny amounts until it’s nice and smooth and feels like dough and is no longer sticky.

Note that it’s better to start with a sticky dough and slowly add flour rather than have too much flour and need to add water.

Cover, let rise for an hour or so. While it’s resting, you can whip up this easy pizza sauce.

Simple Pizza Sauce

• A couple few Marzano whole peeled tomatoes
• A couple cloves smashed garlic
• A couple Tablespoons olive oil
• A Sprinkle of oregano
• A hint of basil
• A bit of salt

You can use the sauce immediately (cold) or simmer for a bit to let the flavors come together. Since we are going to cook the pizza on the flat top, we want “pre-heated” sauce.

Pizza Toppings

• Sausage, Pepperoni, veggies… or whatever, prep them by getting them hot prior to building your pizza. For this pizza, we opted for pepperoni. The wide open spaces of the flat top are perfect heating up the pepperoni.

Bringing it all together. Finishing Touches

• Flatten the crust. Roll it out to individual pan-pizza sizes. To make your life easy , roll it out into steam lid sizes. – Brown the crust on the first side

• Spread the caramelized onions on the crust. The slight oil will help keep the crust crispy.

• Spread the sauce

• Top with Uber thin sliced red onion and (cooked)pepperoni

• Thin sliced fresh mozzarella