I’m going to share here a recipe for an exquisitely awful meal that we decided to try, earlier this summer, just so you don’t have to. It’s a BBQ pizza. By which I mean cooked on the BBQ grill. Here’s where the disclaimer goes: I don’t take responsibility for anything that might happen if you try to replicate any part of this. You could get hurt; very likely you would waste a perfectly good pizza simultaneously with wasting perfectly good BBQ fuel and needlessly contributing to global warming.
And I wouldn’t recommend eating anything that’s charred black as it’s unlikely to be good for you.
So, to proceed:
Whether we’re barbequeueueiing or baking, we like to start with a basic store-bought pizza and supplement it with extra sauce and toppings. In 100 years, when we retire, we will make our own pizza dough. Sooner if we ever buy a house with a gigantic kitchen.
As with so many of my recipes, to replicate the results one must employ subtle, carefully-crafted blends of ingredients. In this case, the dregs of a box of pure English wood charcoal play delicately against the robust not-falling-through-the-grill-ness of briquettes from a newly-opened bag of formed BBQ pellets.
Spread the hot coals into an approximately pizza-sized approximate circle.
Gingerly place the pizza directly on the grill, and cover to seal in the heat.
Wait until you begin to smell hot pizza crust. This should take about 45 seconds.
Inspect the underside of the pizza. It should, if you’ve followed the steps precisely, look quite a lot like this. Authentic BBQ!
Now that the bottom is ready, it’s obviously time to start thinking about cooking the top. We decided to insert something between the coals and the bottom of the pizza. We used a double layer of heavy aluminum foil.
No peeking. This is important, not just because opening the lid allows cold air to waft across the part of the pizza that’s not being radiatively heated, but because it allows fresh oxygen to reach the coals, and they’re already too freaking hot.
Here we are! Just 45 minutes after placing it on the grill, the top of the pizza is ready. If you start later than we did, and want to take photos of your creation, you may have to use a flash.
Only eat the top.
The variation I would try if I were to make BBQ Pizza again is to insert the aluminum foil at an earlier stage, but I fixed our oven, so that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.