Grilled summer pizza

We make grilled pizza A LOT because it’s yummy and easy and we’re lazy. (Hey now, don’t judge us. We’re sharing our cooking secrets.) We generally use store-bought dough, but if you want to make your own, knock yourself out. (We’ve made our own a couple times and it wasn’t any better than the stuff we bought.)

FYI: This pizza was mostly local. The squash and zucchini came from our CSA, the cherry tomatoes came from the plants on our deck and the dough was made just down the road in Yarmouth.

1 ball of pizza dough

cherry tomatoes, halved

tomato sauce

1-2 summer squash, halved length-wise

1-2 zucchini halved length-wise

Garlic powder, basil, oregano, Italian spices

mozzarella (about 1 cup)

½ cup or so of shredded parmesan

*Okay, you may have noticed that we’re pretty lax about the quantities of stuff. That’s intentional. You’ll need enough tomato sauce to cover the dough and enough cheese to make the pizza as cheesy as you like it. Also, we tend to load our pizzas up with veggies, piling them onto the dough until they start falling off. If vegetable-piling isn’t your style, don’t worry about it. Just pile ‘em on until it suits you.

1. Make sure to take the dough out of the fridge at least an hour before making dinner since that will make it easier to roll out.

2. Roll out dough into one or two large (and in our case, often misshapen) circles on a lightly floured surface. (We make two medium-sized pizzas rather than one large one because it’s easier to manage on our grill.)

3. Cook the pizza dough on an oiled, medium-hot grill for 3 to 4 minutes with the top down – the bottoms should have grill marks but not be burned, the tops will still look raw and slightly puffy.

4. Remove the dough from the grill and place on a suitable surface, grill marks facing up.

5. Top the grilled side of the dough with tomato sauce, spreading the sauce out to within a half-inch of the edge.

6. If you’d like, sprinkle the sauced pizza with garlic powder, fresh chopped basil, dried oregano or Italian seasoning to taste.

7. Grill zucchini and squash until tender and grill-marked. Slice and pile on the pizza.

8. Spread tomatoes evenly across the pizza.

9. Top with mozzerella, then sprinkle with parmesan.

10. Re-oil the grill. Place the pizza(s) on the medium-hot grill. Grill for 5 to 7 minutes with the top down, until the cheese has melted, but before the bottom burns. (After about 4 minutes, check on the bottom every minute or so because it can go from just-right to burnt pretty quickly.)

11. Remove from the grill, slice it into squares, wedges or map pieces (whatever floats your boat) and serve!

Kelsey’s been trying to eliminate wheat from her diet in order to improve her asthma (it seems to be working) so we’ve switched to products like pizza dough and bagels that use spelt flour (another species of grain; for more info click here) instead of all purpose wheat flour. Don’t worry. Pete still gets plenty of wheat from the bread in his daily PB&Js.