What You Need To Know When Choosing Toppings For Grilled Pizza

It seems impossible to think of a time when pizza wasn't a regular comfort food for most Americans. While it's been a staple dish in Italy for centuries, it wasn't until the latter half of the 20th century that it became popular in America, and was ultimately exported to countries around the world. Creating a pizza from scratch allows for all sorts of creativity, including in how you cook it.

Grilled pizza may seem like sacrilege to some lovers of the old-fashioned variety, but it's a perfectly viable method for cooking pizza, leaving your dough with char marks that resemble an old-style Neapolitan pie. But there are some tips to know if you're going to grill a pizza: use a thin crust, rely on high-gluten flour that can resist high heat, make sure to grill it on both sides before adding cheese or other toppings. For grilled pizza, you should use specific toppings that are basically already cooked, or that don't need to be cooked at all.

The difference here is how heat interacts with food in an oven versus on a grill. For oven-baked pizzas — be it a brick oven, coal-fired oven, or a regular household oven — the dough and toppings are all going to be exposed to indirect, consistent heat, meaning they'll all get cooked at once. But that's not how it works on a grill, where all the heat is coming from below, creating a char on the bottom of the pizza. This creates a problem for cooking the toppings and cheese, because they're only able to cook through the residual heat of the dough they sit on top of. 

No matter how much of a dairy fan you are, you can't dump massive amounts of cheese on a grilled pizza, because it just won't melt through the residual heat alone. Maybe cold cheese is what you're after if you're a fan of Ohio Valley Pizza, but for everyone else, the answer here is to lightly add cheese with a low melting point like mozzarella. You can add other cheeses on top, but they should be softer cheeses with lower melting points like fresh mozzarella, ricotta, or even blue cheese. Most importantly, before you add any toppings, flip the dough to expose both sides to heat, which will prime the crust to melt the cheese.

As far as what other toppings to use, make sure not to overload the pizza itself. Less is more, especially since you're dealing with a thinner crust, and you want to be able to taste the entire pie. Use toppings that either don't need to be cooked, or that have already been par-cooked (or even fully pre-cooked). Anything pickled or preserved is basically good to go: pickled red onions, artichokes, anchovies (although the fresh kind will go better here), and olives are all great calls. Cured meats also work, because they don't need to be cooked to be enjoyed — so pepperoni or salami is a-okay.

What you can't do is simply drop raw meat on the pizza and expect everything to work itself out. The same goes for vegetables that should be cooked (think mushrooms, onions, etc.). Grilling or par-cooking veggies separately before placing them on the pie as toppings will bring a quality you can't get in an oven-baked pizza. But if you're looking for a nice melt of cheese over cooked red onions, well, that's not likely to happen on a grilled pizza without burning it.

If you follow those instructions and cook your toppings separately, you can add pretty much whatever you want to a grilled pizza. It's just about taking proper care to complete the steps in the right order.