Make a Pizza in Your Gas BBQ

I presently live in a log cabin I built myself. I have no power or even an oven (or glass in my windows, truth be known). I have a small single burner stove and a wood heater on which I can boil water or fry the occasional egg.
But sometimes I want pizza!
I don't have an oven but I do have a nice gas barbecue that I picked up for free because the base was falling apart. It took me an hour to get it all together and cleaned up, but all the burners light and it's a nice way to grill up a slab of elk or venison or a nice salmon filet when it's too dry to safely build a cook fire outside.

I've never heard of anyone cooking pizza in a gas BBQ, but that doesn't mean much. I live a very sheltered life. So at the risk of re-inventing the wheel, I decided to give it my best shot. I was, after all, having pizza withdrawal.

These are the instruments I used to craft my pizza.

A pizza stone might be appropriate here, but I don't have one. What I do have is a big cast iron frying pan. I also don't have easy access to a supermarket where I can purchase a pre-made pizza dough blank. So I'll share with you all my very simple pizza dough recipe.

For a frying pan size pizza you'll need:

• 1 cup of unbleached all-purpose flour (or 1 mug in this case)
• a modicum of salt
• a tablespoon of good oil, in this case, extra virgin olive oil. (I prefer the extra slutty olive oil but I'm out)
• a teaspoon of yeast.
• a 1/2 teaspoon of sugar to rev up the yeast. Since sugar is a poison, too much will kill the yeast.
• and a 1/2 cup (or mug) of lukewarm water.

Mix the yeast and the sugar with the warm water in the bowl and put off to the side for about 10 minutes. This gives the yeast time to "bloom." Nothing worse than unopened yeast buds in your pizza dough. Yecch! In the meantime, mix the flour with the salt and make a well in the center.

Pour the wet ingredients into the well and mix it all together. If your dough is crumbly, add a tiny bit more water. If it's sticky, dust in a little more flour. If the proportions are right, the dough should pull away from the sides of the bowl and form a loose ball. Once this happens it's time to knead.

Dust some flour on the working surface and dump the lump of dough onto it. Dust your hands with flour too. This will help keep the dough from sticking as you work the oil and moisture into the flour. Knead the dough for at least five minutes to develop the gluten, which makes the dough elastic.

Note: If you forgot to wash your hands before you begin to knead, don't worry. Your hands will be clean by the time you've finished.

I only have one bowl, so I washed it and then oiled it and plopped in the kneaded dough. Roll the dough around a bit to coat it with oil. Cover the bowl with a cloth and put it where it's nice and cozy and warm, a place your cat might like to take a nap. Put your cat outside first, though. Cat hair is not a very good pizza topping.

You need to let the dough rise until doubled in size. This will take about an hour. So you have time to go to your Steemit page, find all of my other posts and follow, upvote, comment and resteem them.

Or I guess you could use the time to get all of you toppings together instead. Your choice.

Pizza was invented by an Italian who didn't know what to make for dinner but had a bunch of leftovers and probably not-so-fresh produce that needed to be eaten before it went bad. In other words you can put anything you want on a pizza.

My motto is, "there's no such thing as bad pizza," though some is definitely better than others.

I hear that the Japanese like squid and eggplant and I know Mexicans like lots of hot peppers. I like pesto, teriyaki, spinach, kale, corn...aw heck, I like just about everything as a pizza topping. I wonder if some of my German friends might like schnitzel and sauerkraut? Sounds good to me!

What I happen to have on hand today is a mild green pepper, some garlic, some San Marzano tomatoes, red onion, mozarella cheese, sausage from breakfast, pizza sauce, black olives and some fancy-named expensive Italian meat product that I got the last time I went to town. It looks just pepperoni. It smells like pepperoni, And it tastes just like, uh, pepperoni. One of us born every minute I guess.

Time to get that frying pan smokin' hot. Let's light the BBQ.

Turn on all of your burners to high.

As you can see, I'm lucky enough to have an upper rack in my BBQ. I suppose one could heat the pan on the grill, but that might make it too hot. One could do it indirect, I suppose, only light half the burners and put the pan on the opposite side, but I don't have to do it that way and I'm getting anxious for pizza. Let's move on.

It's been an hour. Let's look at the dough.

Nice, exactly what I wanted.

It's time to roll out the dough. You might have to dust the table with flour again. I didn't have to. No need to make the pizza blank any bigger than the pan bottom since you're going to flip the blank soon after you put it in the smoking hot frying pan.

Once you've rolled out your dough, after about 5 minutes in the BBQ the pan should be hot.

That pan should be a blister factory, so be careful. Also you don't want to burn your counter top so put it on a trivet or a big tile or flat rock. The pan needs to be stable. Carefully drop your pizza blank into the pan. It might not lie flat right away, but you can finagle it into position and pull out any wrinkles if you're quick enough. Those blisters you see in the photo happened in about 30 seconds, that's how hot the pan was. This is also how I make pita bread.

In less than a minute you should turn the pizza blank over. If your pan was hot enough the dough won't stick. If it does, slide a spatula or a flexible knife under it and work it loose, then flip it over. It should look a bit toasted. You don't really have to do this, but I like my pizza crust to match my personality: crusty. And when you're putting on lots of sauce and juicy tomatoes, you need a bit of a barrier on the exposed surface.

Let's build a pizza.

I doubt that there is any particular order to building a pizza other than sauce goes on the bottom and cheese on the top.

Put the pan back in the hot BBQ (on the top rack in my case) and let it cook for while. The time varies depending on how much toppings you put on there, how thick your crust is and how toasty you want that cheese topping to be. I always look after about 5 minutes and then rotate the pan 180 degrees since my BBQ is hotter at the back than it is at the front. It should be done in around 10 minutes more or less.

And there you have it. A delicious pizza you made from scratch and cooked in your gas grill. Bon appétit.