I’m having a pretty exciting week here in my new place, and everyday I’m discovering some gem in this town. I will start posting some of that soon, but didn’t want to leave out one of the good food episodes we had during the vacation in Martha’s Vineyard last week.

On our yearly beach vacation, we usually set aside a couple of nights to get dinner out, and then assign people different nights to be responsible for shopping and cooking for the whole house (usually about 8-10 of us). I felt some added pressure (since I’ve been food blogging and all can’t talk about anything but cooking lately) that I was going to have to do something special. I decided on homemade pizza and teamed up with Heather to become Team Tuesday.

Heather had a brilliant idea of trying to do grilled pizzas, and we found instructions on the web. Many of these sites make it sound really complicated, and we expected we were going to need a few pairs of hands, three spatulas and tongs to make this happen. We decided to try a test pizza, and stay ready to use the oven if need be. All of our concerns were unfounded – this was so easy to do, and it made fantastic pizza.

For the dough – I didn’t want to spend half the day waiting for dough to rise, so I bought 5 16oz. pizza doughs at the Stop and Shop. For each pizza, we used half of one of these. On a floured surface, or floured hands, roll or stretch out the dough. Back in my freshman year of college, I worked at the campus pizza place, and learned a little about this part. The key is to use the tops of your hands and knuckles (not your fingertips, which will easily poke through) to gently stretch the dough. Primarily pull from around the edges, and the middle will pull itself thin on its own.

We heated the gas grill to medium-high and sprayed it with an olive oil spray before the first pizza, but then didn’t add any more, so I’m not sure whether that is really necessary on a well-seasoned grill. We put the dough down, and without getting burned, pulled the edges out a little more. We constantly checked it until it was crisp and brown on the bottom, and then flipped it over. It took one spatula and a couple fingers to do it easily.

Toppings: Once we flipped it, we worked quickly to add sauce, cheese and toppings. Then we closed the lid to circulate the heat to melt the toppings while the bottom cooked. You can’t load too much on these pizzas, and you have to precook all the toppings, since they’ll only be on the grill for 5 minutes or so.

We had a range of toppings available and took special requests, including:

  • Buffalo chicken and blue cheese (my favorite)
  • Shrimp and roasted garlic
  • Combinations of pepperoni, sausage, onions, mushrooms, eggplant, red peppers

One warning on making these pizzas – I would not make these for a large group again. Because we could only do one pizza at a time, after we finished four of them, we let everyone start eating, and we kept cooking. So we ended up spending a good two hours at the grill and were finally able to join everyone (already stuffed) at the end. While we were outside, we heard some chanting from inside, and when we came in, we were treated to an original cheer, led by Brittnie, called “Pizza on the Beach.” It was the awesomest response that a cook could get. I didn’t save the lyrics, but maybe someone from the group could post them in comments?

The final product.

(All photos by Kristen Beam.)