Recipe Review from 7/7/08

Just a couple of dishes from last week, but these were a lot of fun - grilled pizza! From scratch! Oh, this was so much fun. I did have some initial trepidation about the pizza dough, but it turned out just perfect.

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough (Eating Well, July/Aug 08) 5.0
This is a combination of whole wheat, AP flour and cornmeal, mixed with water, yeast, salt and a tich of sugar. The dough is kneaded until baby-bum smooth and allowed to rise for an hour. This ended up being a bit longer as I needed to get the grill going. Then it is shaped, placed on a peel or cookie sheet (liberally sprinkled with cornmeal) and slid onto the grill. I grilled it on a gas grill for about 10 minutes at roughly 350* to 400*.

The first one I made stuck to my cookie sheet and kinda glumped off onto the grill - more angst as I tried to quickly spread it out. The second one I used a lot more cornmeal and it slid off beautifully.

The directions call for flipping the dough - not as hard as I thought it would be - as it is like a flatbread - and then put on the respective toppings. You do have to work quickly as all your heat is escaping. I thought for sure the dough would be tough or slightly burnt from all this time on the grill, but it was crispy with a nice tender inside. Just the way the Husband likes it.

So I made two variations on this:


Eggplant Parmesan Pizza (Eating Well, July/Aug 08) 4.0
Using the pizza dough recipe from above, the toppings were: a marinara sauce, garlic, grilled chopped eggplant, kalmata olives and thinly sliced Parmesan cheese. I thickened my marinara sauce with a bit of tomato paste because I like my sauce a bit thicker. I didn’t care for the raw garlic spread right on the dough and next time I would take the time to saute it and add it to the sauce to temper the bite a bit. This turned out really good and was a nice variation on your basic pizza toppings.


Nacho Pizza (Eating Well, July/Aug 08) 4.0
Again, using the pizza dough recipe from above, the toppings this time were black beans pureed with garlic (sauteed this time) and jarred roasted red peppers. Lucky me! I had a half jar on hand that needed to be used up. This forms the “sauce”. The rest of the toppings were a chopped pickled jalapeno - which I also had on hand! - monteray jack cheese, chopped tomato and fresh Swiss chard from the garden. I forgot to get some sour cream, so I used an avocado I had on hand to spread on afterwards. Yum!

I will definitely be making pizza like this again! So easy, and they offered an oven variation as well.