I watched Alex Guarnaschelli make pizza on one of her early cooking shows. She deep fried a full size crust in a large cast iron skillet stovetop. She said that’s the way her father did it. I never tried it since it seemed like too much of a mess. But I’ve never forgotten that episode because I adore crispy oily pizza crust. Checking out recipes online, apparently deep fried pizza crust is a specialty of Naples. Yum.
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Just a thought - Does the grill have a cover to rig up an oven? A possible drawback to making pizza on an open grill is cooking it from the bottom up. You’ll have to let us know how things work out.
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It does have a cover, but it’s a charcoal grill at our weekend cabin, so I can’t preheat for very long. We’ll start going up to in late April, and I’ll report back if I attempt this.
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My charcoal grill experience is nearly nothing, but I don’t remember any of them being shiny inside… I wonder if some foil, strategically placed inside the cover to reflect heat onto the top of the pizza, might be helpful - or a waste of time.
Intriguing! The cover is red, and not very shiny. I’ll try the foil thing.
Enjoy the experimentation!
Looking forward to it. It’s 27 degrees up there now, so I’ve got a bit of a wait.
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I think that the recipes that call for flipping the pizza dough after cooking on one side do so to allow the dough to cook without burning on the bottom. I make pizza on a gas grill and before I got a baking stone, I found flipping to be essential.
I don’t flip now that I have a stone. I’m able to use indirect heat after the stone is preheated and I put the dough onto it. Bottom crust burned before the dough cooked through, otherwise. I close the lid of the gas grill for an oven effect.
Obviously grills and heat sources differ so someone else’s results could vary.
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We’ve been having awfully good luck cooking pizza ON THE FLOOR of our range over, preheated to 550F.
We form the pizza on a thin aluminum cookie sheet, dusted with polenta, instead of a peel, then place the cookie tin directly on the floor of the oven. -> very crisp crust. Here, one of our thin crust pies…
Topping of pureed tomato, garlic and olive oil, fontina and Oaxacan cheeses.
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I use a stone on the grill too. I’ve heard of people throwing the dough straight on to the grill but I’ve never been successful at that. I always close the lid. They call it a pizza oven for a reason and without the top you really can’t mimic an oven.
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I would the temperature to go up another 50 degrees. I’m a cold weather wimp.
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When Bill Clinton was president, and on a trip including a stop in Naples, he had a deep-fried pizza. That was before he was watching his diet and his weight.
Some people will deep fry anything. Twinkies. Doesn’t mean it is food when it comes out.
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We were about to take the plunge for a fried Mars Bar at an Edinburgh chip shop when we saw a slice of frozen pizza being plunged in the fryer for the previous patron’s order. Switching gears, we asked to make it two and ended up with something like an Indian flatbread.
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You just had to mention him didn’t you.
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Pizza fritte is totally a thing. My friends in Italy had it last week for the first course of their delicious looking takeout dinner while we were catching up via Zoom.
I have a hunch the dish would have been up to Dave standards. But then, their entire meal looked great.
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Me, too. My blood is thin.
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Now I am both hungry and jealous.
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If you do it right it is!
Hugs.
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