Grilled Pizza: Bear Locker Surprise

Camping is all about the food.  Well, OK, and the relaxation and the decompression and the breathing fresh air and the listening to loons and the blah blah blah, but for me, all of that is accentuated by and/or includes eating and cooking.  I see no reason to sacrifice wine and cheese appetizers just because I’m in the woods.  If I’m inspired and have mental prep time, I try to branch out of the comfort zone of the usual potato pocket and pork loin staples and try something a little new.  This year I saw some flatbreads at Trader Joe’s:  inspiration for grilled pizzas.  Thought bubble:  what a great way to get rid of some leftovers at the end of the week….     I understand that these grilled pizzas are quite popular with the home grilling crowd – make your own dough, stick it on the grill, make delish pizzas - but I’ve never done it.  And to make your own dough out there was ridiculous and so I thought these little flatbreads could be perfect.  And let me tell you... they were even better than I had thought they could be.

All week long we made too much of everything - that is how I am - and so by Friday night, we had leftover grilled chicken, leftover grilled pork tenderloin, a salami we were eating all week with appetizers, enough onions to float a boat, and some leftover grilled pineapple we had hanging around from an earlier meal where we grilled the pineapple with a little oil and crushed thai hot pepper as a pork side.  It was all good stuff, but it had to go.  The bed of coals was laid, the fixin’s were pulled out from the bear locker, and the drinks were poured.  The sun was still up, but it was perfect weather finally and the Cedar Waxwings were buzzing their way into evening mode all around us.   Bring on the pizzas.

 

Grilled Pizza

THE STUFF:

Flatbreads (1 or 2 6” Trader Joe’s Flatbreads/person did the trick for us – tortilla and pita are not the same!)

Pizza sauce (we used pizza sauce and leftover salsa, but of course pasta sauce would be good, too)

Grated Mozzarella Cheese (or Manchego or whatever rocks your world)

Olive Oil for brushing on flatbreads

Fixin’s       (whatever you may have:    we had grilled chicken, grilled pork, onions, hot pepper, salsa, hard salami sliced thinly, grilled pineapple chunks, Pasta spices from Penzy’s, crushed dried Thai hot peppers from my garden, salt and pepper)

HOW TO:

-Arrange the grate over the coals so that you have a hot spot (lots of coals), a warm spot (on edge of coals), and a safe spot (no coals) – which means, in our case, we had a couple of rounds of making these as we could only fit about 3 on at a time safely.

-We pre-heated our toppings a bit in beds of tinfoil over the coals and cooked the onion a little bit in its tinfoil bed over high heat (we should buy tinfoil stock when we go camping)

-Brush the flatbreads on both sides with olive oil and place directly over coals on hot spot – it will very quickly start to inflate a bit creating a bubbly topography on the top and nice grill marks and toasting on the bottom.  Turn the flatbread over and move to the cool side of the grill

-Make your pizza like you normally would by topping flatbread with sauce and cheese and toppings to your liking and tent the pizzas with tin foil and move back to ‘warm’ spot on grill to toast the bottoms and melt the tops.  For us, that meant I rotated the little jobbers after a few minutes to make sure both sides of the flatbreads got toasty.  This should take maybe 5 minutes total to get a nice brown on the bottom and melty bubbly cheese on top.

Pull them off the grill and chow!   They were crunchy and tasty and man oh man a great use of leftovers from our bear locker.  Everyone made their own combinations and it was a grand success. This whole process would be just as easy if not easier on a home grill, so I plan to make my pizzas like this forever!  You may note that I still haven’t come up with a home-made pizza crust I really like so if you have any clues on that one, let me know….  For now, the flatbread over coals method rules.

Grill on!