Summer Pizza

It’s been hot this week, and we live above a garage – without air conditioning.  At 4pm today it was 90º inside, and today’s a cooler than it has been for a while.  SO, we’ve not only been eating outside, but only cooking meals that can be “cooked” on the grill because the last thing we want to do right now is use the stove.  And the oven?  Since our apartment spends most of the day being an oven, we can hardly even imagine turning the actual oven on – but when I do imagine it, the picture I see is the paint actually melting off our walls.

This weekend we found a delicious way to make pizza using the grill (we also found a definite way not to make pizza on the grill, but that’s another, much sadder, story.)  I got the idea here.  For the dough, I used my artisan bread dough, with a little whole wheat flour.  I’ll share my pizza since Z’s pizza involves the sadder story already mentioned.

• I put some olive oil in the bottom of a disposable cake pan, just enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan.
• I broke off ½ pound of the dough and rolled it out to fit in the pan.
• Once the dough was in the pan,  I spread some crushed garlic over the dough, and then started in on my toppings:
  • basil leaves, grown on our patio
  • chopped prosciutto
  • sliced kalamata olives (made one with and one without, both were good)
  • slices of fresh tomato
  • topped with Brie goat cheese from Trader Joe’s – yummy and lactose-intolerant-friendly.
• Then I drizzled the top with olive oil and let it sit in the hot apartment for 20-30 minutes

Our grill gets very hot, changing the setting from “high” to “low” doesn’t seem to effect the flame at all – it’s just hot everywhere these days.  So I didn’t pre-heat our grill much before sliding the pie pan right onto the grill.  Even though it was set on low, it cooked in about 15 minutes.   And when I slid it out of the pan, I had a deep-dish-focaccia-style pizza.  One edge was a little blackened on the bottom, so next time I’m going to try to turn the pan once or twice while it’s cooking.  I’d also like to try the olive oil dough recipe the next time around.

It was a delicious pizza, and we’re happy that we don’t have to give up our weekly pizza because of the heat. Yay!