Changing Up Your Pizza Toppings
Grilling season is a perfect time to change up your traditional pizza recipes for something more experimental. While we respect the classics, there are always hungry guests willing to try something new. And when you have the ability to cook a pizza in 5 minutes, even the most radical pies get eaten.
BBQ/Pizza Combo
To try something new, we partnered with our sister brand, Charcoal Companion® to pre-grill our pizza toppings before finishing off the full pie in a Pizzeria Pronto® Outdoor Pizza Oven
When you are experimenting with new toppings you need to take into account how fast they cook in comparison to your crust: Chicken, shrimp, thicker cuts of meat, and thick veggies take longer to fully cook than your dough will. To ensure safely cooked toppings (and to maximize the flavor of a food) we recommend pre-cooking some toppings before adding them to your pizza.
Tricks Of The Trade
To cook our BBQ style pizzas we grilled up shrimp and chicken as our toppings first. To do so we used one of our favorite Charcoal Companion® grilling accessories, the Non-Stick Mesh Grill Bags. The grill bags are non-stick mesh, and work perfectly to grill small things like chopped veggies or shrimp. The bags are heat safe up to 600°F, dishwasher safe, and reusable. Just fill the bag with your favorite toppings and throw them right on the grill. They make turning your food easy, and when our toppings were just about done we simply poured them out on our pizza to finish cooking with the rest of the pie.
To cook chicken for a BBQ chicken pizza we used the Charcoal Companion® Flex Grill Sheets™. Just like the Mesh Grill Bags, the flexible sheets can be placed directly on the grill to cook smaller toppings without having them fall through the grates. Not only that, but the sheets help food retain their moisture when grilling. Food like steak, chicken, and vegetables that can easily become dry when cooked directly on the grates.
From The BBQ To The Oven
Once all of our grilled toppings were done we placed them on the uncooked pizza to be finished off in one of our Pizzacraft® Pizza Ovens. We chose to finish the pizzas in the Pronto, but they could also have the full grill experience and be finished on the barbecue with the PizzaQue® Kit for Gas Grills
The pizza came out amazing and with the help of the grill, we did not have to battle the various cooking times of thicker toppings vs. the fast cooking dough. This made for a perfectly cooked crust and juicy toppings to make an amazing grilled pizza combination.
For More BBQ Pizza Recipes and Tricks:
>National BBQ (Pizza) Month! Gear For Your GrillPizzaQue® Baking Kit For Gas Grills
We hope these barbecue accessories get you experimenting with some new toppings this summer. We would love to see what you create on Instagram @_pizzacraft #pizzacraft.