Adventures in Pizza

We just got a Big Green Egg (BGE). It has been a lot of fun cooking and grilling on it.  In a short period of time, we, ok, Greg, has made ribs (baby back and beef), brisket, burgers, and a turkey breast.  Oh, and pizza.  Yup – pizza.  On a grill.  And it wasn’t that bad, either.

Let me back up a bit…One of the accessories for the BGE is a pizza stone, so we got it.  You can use it to bake bread, pizza, calzones, and I’m sure other things.  So we decided to make pizza.  From scratch.

This particular afternoon was one full of learning experiences, which I’ll write about, here.  I won’t post any recipes, as I plan on making more until I find one I really like.

So I looked for pizza dough recipes and found a few.  I had wanted a honey-wheat dough.  I found a wheat dough and added some honey.  This particular recipe was done by hand, not a food processor or mix-master.  So I tried this dough, by hand.  And it was sticky.  And I was impatient, and when the dough would not unstick from my hands, I threw it away and started over.  So the second time around I used the mix-master – wow, I was amazed at how it came together!  (I haven’t made that many breads before).  Followed the directions.  A few hours later, it was time to roll out the dough and top it.

When it was time to roll out the dough, I rolled out a thin one.  When Greg saw it, he said it was too thin, so I rolled out one for him, but a little thicker.  I then took my dough, put it on a plate, and topped it.  Oh yeah – I made the sauce from scratch, too. 

When it came time to bake the pizza, I couldn’t transfer my pizza fro   m the plate to the stone.  It was sticking and heavy!  Oops…so lesson #1 – pre-bake the dough.  We finally managed to get the pizza onto the stone, but it was now shaped funnily!  Fast forward 20 minutes, and we had to get the pizza off the stone onto something.  It stuck a little.  Lesson #2 – put cornmeal on the stone before putting pizza on it.

So, mine was made, now to bake Greg’s.  We started off by putting cornmeal on the pizza stone, but still had a time trying to transfer the pizza.  And his was heavier, since we used more dough.  Oh, and it started raining out.  Fast forward 20 minutes, and boy, has his dough risen!!!  Guess we forgot about the whole rising action.

So we ate both pizzas.  They were pretty good.  One was definitely thicker than the other. 

I definitely want to make this again.  And I will probably keep making it until I perfect the dough (at least to our taste!)