By Christine McPheter
Pizza Dough for the Grill
By Frank McClelland Fine Cooking Issue 66
Scott Phillips
Yield: Yields enough for eight small pizzas.
Figure one to two balls of dough per person. Make two separate batches if you need more dough.
Ingredients
- 1 package (2-1/4 tsp.) active dry yeast or 1 oz. fresh yeast
- 1-1/4 cups warm water (about 105°F)
- 1-1/4 lb. (about 4-1/4 cups) all-purpose flour
- 2 tsp. kosher salt
- 1/4 cup olive oil; more for the bowl
Preparation
- Stir the yeast into the water; let sit for 15 minutes. Combine the flour and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook or in a large bowl. On low speed in the stand mixer or stirring with a wooden spoon, slowly add the yeast mixture and the olive oil alternately to the flour. Knead for 6 minutes on low speed in the stand mixer or on a floured surface by hand until it becomes elastic. The dough should feel soft and just a little sticky. If it feels grainy or dry, add 1 tablespoon warm water at a time (up to 1/4 cup). Knead for another 2 minutes by hand on a floured surface.
To use the dough the same day:
- Transfer the dough to a lightly oiled bowl that’s at least twice the size of the dough and cover with a damp dishtowel. Let rise at room temperature until almost doubled, about 1 hour. The dough is ready when you poke a finger in it and it holds the impression.
To hold the dough for one day:
- Put the dough in a lightly oiled bowl that’s at least twice the size of the dough and cover with plastic; refrigerate overnight. It will rise slowly in the cold, doubling in size.
To freeze the dough:
- Put the unrisen dough directly into a large zip-top bag. Freeze for up to one month. Transfer it to the refrigerator one day before proceeding.
- Let refrigerated dough warm up for 20 minutes at room temperature before proceeding.
- Punch down the dough and divide it into eight 4-ounce balls. Put each ball on a floured surface and, with your hands, flatten and stretch it into a disk that’s about 1/2 inch thick. The dough will be fairly elastic and will tend to spring back. Cover each piece with plastic and let rest for 5 minutes. Stretch or roll each disk into an 8- to 10-inch round about 1/8 inch thick (the thinner, the better). If they continue to seem springy and resist rolling, cover and let rest for a few more minutes. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment or waxed paper and layer the rounds on it with a sheet of parchment or waxed paper between each. Use the dough immediately or cover and refrigerate for up to 4 hours.
Separate the rounds with sheets of parchment or waxed paper.
Grill the pizzas
- Fire up the grill (gas or charcoal).
- Use both hands to pick up a round of dough. Moving quickly and holding the top edge of the dough, lay the bottom edge (oiled side down) on the hot part of the grill. As soon as the first edge of the dough makes contact with the grill grate, pull gently on the dough as you finish laying it down to stretch it thinly.
Place the round on the grill. - Brush the top of the dough with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Grill without moving until the pizza browns and develops good grill marks on the bottom, 1 to 3 minutes; check frequently to prevent burning.
- Flip the dough with a spatula and tongs and arrange your choice of toppings on the browned side of the pizza. For toppings, try Olive Tapenade, Roasted Vidalia Onions, Roasted Red Pepper Purée, Roasted Garlic, or one of the no-cook toppings listed below. (Work quickly, or move the pizza to the cooler area of the grill while topping.) When the bottom has browned and developed strong grill marks, 1 to 3 minutes, move the pizza to the cooler part of the grill.
Flip the dough. - Close the lid and grill until the pizza toppings are hot to the touch and any cheese has melted, 3 to 8 minutes. Check the bottom of the pizza frequently, turning the pizza from back to front and side to side to prevent burning in case your grill has any hot spots. Transfer the pizza to a cutting board and slice. Serve immediately.
Make Ahead Tips
You can make the dough, let it rise, and shape it all in about an hour. Or you can make the dough ahead. You can refrigerate the dough overnight (it will rise slowly in the cold, and then it will need 20 to 30 minutes at room temperature before you shape it.) For longer storage, freeze the dough for up to a month. Thaw frozen dough overnight in the refrigerator or on the counter at room temperature for 2 to 2-1/2 hours.
No-cook toppings: pepperoni, thinly sliced prosciutto, or sliced cured sausage; olives, capers, slivered sun-dried tomatoes, hot cherry peppers, or anchovies; thinly sliced ripe beefsteak or plum tomatoes, quartered cherry tomatoes, or good-quality canned diced tomatoes, drained; baby spinach or arugula leaves; prepared pesto
Pizza
Video series
https://www.ciaprochef.com/BPE/
THE BAKING AND PASTRY EXCELLENCE VIDEO SERIES
The CIA’s Baking and Pastry Excellence Program is a documentary series that seeks out the world’s best bakers and pastry chefs. Through these experts we explain techniques and flavor dynamics within their cultural contexts, and add them to a growing online video library that effectively preserves these traditions for our industry and future generations of bakers, pastry chefs, cooks, food writers and culinary enthusiasts.
How to make:
https://sugarspunrun.com/the-best-pizza-dough-recipe/
Vary your protein: https://www.ksre.k-state.edu/humannutrition/nutrition-topics/eatingwell-budget/meals-documents/VYPRecipeBook.pdf K-State Pizza recipe page 25 made with tortillas
https://firstwefeast.com/eat/2015/11/illustrated-history-of-pizza-in-america
Originally published by First We Feast
The first thing one needs to know about the history of pizza is that there’s no such thing as the official history of pizza. At several points during our conversation, Carol Helstosky, author of Pizza: A Global History and Associate Professor of History at the University of Denver, pauses to make sure I know that several key junctures in pizza’s development are hotly contested among die-hard pizza fans. Because as anyone who has spent any amount of time scrolling through Tumblr or Instagram accounts knows—there’s no food that captures our zeitgeist quite like ‘za.
From how pizza margherita got its name, to the definition of pizza itself, there’s plenty that remains up for debate in spite of its overwhelming popularity. Depending on what counts as “pizza,” for example, its origins can date all the way back to ancient Greece, or up to just a few centuries ago. But to write her book, Helstosky had to start somewhere. She now considers any “flatbread made with yeast, baked at a very high temperature, and topped with tomatoes and cheese” to be pizza, a standard that fast-forwards through centuries’ worth of portable, bread-based meals and puts the start date of pizza as we know it firmly in 18th-century Naples.
There, pizza started as “a quick, nourishing, and cheap meal” for the working class, a tradition that lives on in the form of dollar-slice joints. And though it remained a particularly Neapolitan dish for more than a century after its invention, it eventually followed the now well-worn path of ethnic food in America: introduction by immigrants, increasing popularity outside the Italian-American community, and eventually assimilation into the mass market.
Along the way, however, the history of pizza has found itself affiliated with royalty, World War II, and the most important demographic at all: hungry college students. Without further ado, here are the five phases that shaped pizza as we know it.
Illustrations by Max Schieble.
A Humble Snack from Naples
For the soldiers, sailors, and other blue-collar laborers who were pizza’s earliest enthusiasts, options were limited. In 1700s Naples, Helstosky says, pizza came in two basic varieties: “You have the marinara, which was tomatoes with some anchovies and perhaps some oregano on it; you then might have something sort of like a pizza bianca, with garlic and seasoning.” That was it. Then again, that’s all workers really needed from early pizzerias, which mostly served to provide efficient, inexpensive fuel for customers. Pizza wouldn’t acquire any gourmet cachet for a while.
Pizza remained a local Neapolitan specialty for over 200 years, to the point where “if you lived in Venice, for example, you wouldn’t know anything about pizza unless you had traveled to Naples and tried it.” Before it made its way to the United States or the rest of Italy, however, pizza evolved into something closer to what we eat today, with mozzarella, sauce, and basil-topped margherita developing sometime in the 19th century.
There’s plenty of “mythmaking and patriotic folklore” surrounding how the margherita got its name, and Helstosky offers just one example. According to this particular urban legend, Margherita of Savoy, then the Queen of Italy, wanted to sample the local specialty on a trip to Naples; of the three pies she was served, the margherita was the one she liked best, and it was subsequently named after her. That’s just one story, among many, though.
By Italians, For Italians
Like many “ethnic” foods now available in your local supermarket’s frozen foods section, pizza came to America during the massive influx of southern- and eastern-European immigrants, beginning in the late 19th century. (See: bagel.) Since most Italian immigrants were coming from the southern half of the country, Neapolitan foods like pizza ended up crossing the Atlantic before they even traveled up the boot. “As odd as it sounds,” Helstosky says, “you were more likely to find pizza in New York City than in, say, Rome or Milan by 1900 or 1910.”
Once it landed stateside, however, pizza remained a dish that was largely known within the community—not outside it. Pizza was often prepared as a snack at home, though full-fledged pizzerias opened up in various Italian-American hubs concentrated in the Northeast: northern New Jersey, New Haven, and of course, New York. But said pizzerias were primarily for southern Italians, by southern Italians. While Italian restaurants may not seem exotic now, in the 1920s and 1930s they weren’t attracting much of a WASP clientele.
That started to change after World War II, when Naples became a hub for British and American intelligence agents. During their time overseas, many troops developed a taste for Italian food, including pizza, and subsequently sought it out when they returned home—much to the confusion of restaurateurs, who didn’t understand what Americans wanted with a traditionally lower-class street food. Still, veterans played a role in popularizing pizza outside the Italian community.
Taking It National
With popularity inevitably comes industrialization, and pizza was no exception. The 1950s and 1960s saw the rise of fast food in America, and while the hamburger is typically considered the poster child of the standardization and rapid expansion embodied by restaurants like McDonald’s, pizza saw its own fledgling mega-chains in the form of Domino’s and Pizza Hut.
From the beginning, Helstosky explains, businessmen like Domino’s founder Tom Monaghan set their businesses up to be national franchises, emphasizing efficiency and uniformity across locations. Unlike traditionally independent, immigrant family-owned pizzerias, fast-food pizza chains were modeled around delivery and takeout rather than serving customers in their actual stores. Also, unlike older pizzerias, they were able to establish a presence in the Midwest, far away from American pizza’s traditional stronghold in the Northeast.
Despite their emphasis on pizza as “product,” however, fast-food chains did have one thing in common with their forebears: their customers. Domino’s began opening restaurants near military bases and college campuses, understanding that both soldiers and students were looking for the same quick, cheap meal as Neapolitan workers had been 200 years before them.
Pizza Goes (Mid)West
No history of pizza in America, however, would be complete without a sidebar dedicated to Chicago-style, which reached the Midwest—and shaped its preferences—long before Pizza Hut.
Even though deep-dish pies are referred to as “pizza,” they are actually descendants from another food entirely different than the thin-crust, Neapolitan pies of New York and Connecticut. Like the pizza margherita, Chicago pizza’s origins are hotly debated, but one theory holds that deep dish’s ancestor is actually the Sicilian dish sfincione, which Helstosky describes as “a deep-dish pie with tomatoes and cheese and other toppings layered into it.” The flaky, cheesy pies found at now-legendary places like Giordano’s certainly resemble the sfincione more than, say, a pizza bianca.
After Sicilian-Americans brought their pie overseas, it caught on both among other Italian-Americans and in the Midwest at large. This is why Pizza Hut and Domino’s, in an effort to appeal to Midwestern audiences, went national with “chewier, more substantial” pies boasting more toppings than the average Neapolitan pizza—thereby creating the hybrid pie most Americans grow up getting delivered to their front door.
Farm, to Woodfired Oven, to Table
While independently owned pizzerias—often operated by other immigrant groups such as Greek-Americans as well as Italian-Americans—never disappeared, fast-food pizza dominated the American landscape for several decades. The 1980s, however, saw the birth of the farm-to-table movement in California, an ethos that now dominates even fast food (Chipotle, anyone?), but arguably began with pizza.
Among its other offerings, Helstosky explains, Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse included “incredibly creative individual pizzas” assembled from farmed or foraged ingredients. In Los Angeles, Wolfgang Puck did more or less the same thing, sparking a trend that moved eastward over the past few decades—reversing pizza’s initial trajectory—and culminated in Brooklyn artisanal spots like Roberta’s.
In 2015, it’s easy to find locally-sourced, vegan, or even gluten-free pizzas that go for twenty dollars or more a pie. That’s a far cry from pizza’s humble origins as cheap fuel for laborers. But despite farm-to-table’s current popularity, the 2am dollar slice, we all know, remains eternal.
Now its your turn to cook PIZZA on the GRILL- My favorite is a grilled or brick oven pizza. I like the thin, toasty crust and I find it similar to the Truck Stop Pizza’s in Meade.
