Low-effort, low-mess pizza @ home

[janeer]

For those of you who live in Rhode Island, or nearby and and want to make the occasional excursion with a cooler, I highly recommend Olga's pizza shells for thin pizzas that serve two. I buy them at Lee's Market in Westport, MA (I imagine they are available at Olga's and other places in Providence) and always have them in my freezer. Just take one out, put it onto a sheet pan or stone, use your 15-min quick-cooked sauce and cheese, and voila: a very fast, neat, and delicious pizza. I am only in RI for the summer, so the rest of the year I make own thin frozen shells. I make my dough in the food processor, usually enough for four pizzas, roll them out thin, freeze them on cornmeal-dusted sheet pans, then pack into bags. My basic recipe is similar to the one in Marcella Hazan's first (I think) book; sometimes I add a little cornmeal. For spending 45 min or less doing this on a weekend, I can pull them out and have pizza with minimal effort. I am not a fan of store-bought dough.

[CDRFloppingham]

I did not read through the whole thread so I apologize if this has been covered.

Can I heat my grill (I use Grill Grates on it...great product) and use that as the oven?

I'm not looked for a "grilled" pizza...I plan to use the half sheet pan but to use my Weber Genesis as the oven.

Do you think I'll get an acceptable product?

TIA

[CDRFloppingham]

I'm going with the inside oven since it's only 84 degrees F outside. Ultimately, I think there's too much bottom heat...the crust will get burned.

If anyone has experience baking pizza in a gas grill, I'd love to know what you think though.

[lstrelau]

We quite often bake pizza on our Weber gas grill. Preheat the grill for at least 15 minutes or a bit longer, on full power. I have stretched my dought out on a small cookie sheet (whatever fits your grill comfortably.

It cooks really fast. Thin crusts work best - a thick crust would burn on bottom before it cooked through. Not too much topping or it becomes unwieldy.

Have also used a pizza stone in the Weber, heat it up as above and use a peel to shift the pizza onto the hot stone. probably better results than the too-thin metal of the sheet pan.

I think I even tried one directly on the cleaned grill, no pan, no stone. Didn't stick but a bit tricky getting it off - need a metal peel.

Suppose you could also preheat then turn off the centre burner of the Weber and cook with convective heat rather than direct.

[Genkinaonna]

I bake pizza on a gas grill all the time. Just get it screaming hot, oil the dough and make it thin, flip it once, add toppings and about 3 min later you have pizza. I do it right on the grates though, I'd imagine you could put a sheet pan on there and do it like that too.

I use dough I buy from a local pizzaria although I'm contemplating experimenting with the Artisan bread in 5 minutes a day recipe...

[runwestierun]

I also cook pizza on my Weber quite regularly. I use a round aluminum pizza pan with holes in it. I spray it with Pam and stretch the dough thin over it. I preheat the grill wide open for 15 minutes to get it as hot as I can. My grill will hit 750F.

I place a wok ring on the grate and place the pizza pan on that. It takes between 4 and 6 minutes for the dough and cheese to brown thoroughly. Then the pizza has to come off the pan onto a peel within 30 seconds or it will burn because the pan keeps cooking it.

My Weber cooks the pizza much more like a wood oven than my Kitchen's oven. I have found if I don't use the wok ring, the dough burns before the cheese browns.

My neighbor has a newer Weber than mine. When she heats hers wide open for 15 minutes, it will only get to 550F, so her Weber with the same setup makes pizza that tastes like it was cooked in an oven--no lovely blackened dough bubbles like mine.

[ChrisTaylor]

Decided to have a crack at LELMP@H too, given I felt like pizza but didn't feel like cleaning up flour. I looked in both the supermarket and Italian deli for pre-made dough but couldn't find it. I ended up opting for a pre-made base. The list of ingredients didn't sound too much like a shampoo bottle.

Pork pizza: pork sausage, porketta, prosciutto and calabrese salami.

Non-pork pizza: olives, semi-dried tomatoes, onion, capsicum and chilli.

[butterscotch]

Fat Guy

What ever happened with your experiments with lower temps? Any other updates to ingredients or new modifications we should know about?

[Robert Jueneman]

See my post in the Modernist Cuisine thread, at

I don't want to have to bother with making my own pizza dough although I'm willing to concede that it might be better. But the secret to the best tasting pizza I have ever eaten was the simplest ingredients imaginable (a Boboli thin crust pizza shell), cooked in a cast iron pizza pan from Le Creuset (or you could use an upside-down cast iron skillet.)

Heat the pan in oven to 550F for 30 minutes, and then turn on the Broiler on High for about 10 minutes before slipping the pizza in. In my case, according to my Fluke IR thermometer, the pan reached 640F, but that was just right for a perfect crust, while the broiler cooked the toppings perfectly. A second attempt, using my gas grill at 700F didn't work nearly as well -- the pizza crust was scorched before the toppings were ready.

Next week, I'll do some more exact timings, and take some pictures.

Bob