Monday, July 20, 2009

Grilled Pizza with Pesto and Buffalo Mozzarella

After having crispy zucchini flowers stuffed with ricotta and mint as a starter, we did not downgrade for our main dish. I've always wanted to try making pizza on the BBQ and again, took advantage of my sister visiting to give it a try. She had watched an episode of America's Test Kitchen (I've never seen this show?!) where a dough was prepared specifically to hold up to grilling. We found the recipe and she got to work!



I think anyone who has a BBQ should trying making pizza on it. It's totally worthwhile and nothing like plain old regular pizza! I am personally not a dough person and usually leave pizza crust uneaten; I prefer thin crust pizzas. However, I really enjoyed this pizza crust. It was like eating pizza on naan bread! I don't even think it's necessary to make your own dough. I'm sure a store bought dough would yield similar results. One of our worries was that the dough would not hold on the grill and would just fall between the cracks. That was not an issue at all. The only area we had difficulty with was unsticking the dough to place onto the grill. Flour your rolled dough very well!

Grilled Pizza with Pesto and Buffalo Mozzarella
For the pizza dough, we followed America's Test Kitchen recipe. It went well but L had to add a lot of flour because the dough was still sticking to the food processor. We tried to go easy on the toppings because we were worried that the dough would not be able to hold much. The dough came out quite sturdy and surely would have held more. Having said this, we really enjoyed only having three but excellent toppings: pesto (homemade with basil from my garden), buffalo mozzarella and tomato. This dough would also be excellent for foccacia!

* pizza dough, divided into individual portions
* pesto
* tomato slices
* buffalo mozzarella, sliced
* chili flakes (optional)
* grated Parmesan (optional)

Roll your dough out and place on well floured parchment paper.
Grill the dough on one side until you get nice grill marks.
Spread pesto on the grilled side of the dough.
Top with tomato slices, mozzarella, chili flakes and Parmesan.
Place back on BBQ.
Remove when cheese has melted and there are nice grill marks on the underside.
Tada!



Don't the grill marks look just great?


Grilling our pizzas.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks great! where did you find Buffalo Mozarella in Hamilton area?

Miss.Adventure said...

I bought it at the Farmer's Market but I think you can even find it at Fortino's! Good luck!