If you’ve never grilled pizza before, now is the perfect time to try it! And if you have grilled pizza before, now is definitely time to do it again. This is my FAVORITE way to make homemade pizza because no matter how hard I try, most homemade pizza tastes, well, slightly homemade, even in the best of circumstances. This is because most of us don’t have the kind of equipment needed to bake pizza crusts quickly and evenly, so frequently taste a lot like bread instead of pizza crust. But if you have a grill, you can replicate individual-sized pizzas from your favorite brick- or wood-fired pizza restaurants! This is amazing party food because everyone can get exactly the pizza they want in just a few minutes.
Ingredient Notes
- Dough – You’ll need pizza dough. Obviously. You can use any pizza dough- whatever you normally use to make pizza at home. Here is a great recipe for homemade dough and another for Neapolitan Pizza Crust (which is perfect for the grill.) If you’re planning on serving more than a few people, but even if you’re not, I highly recommend making the dough ahead of time and freezing it into individual crusts to prevent the dough from over-rising, especially on a hot summer night.. You could also buy dough. Many grocery stores, clubs like Costco and Sam’s Club, and bakeries sell fresh, raw pizza dough.
- Sauce – Grilled pizza works great sauce-less, or try it with this pizza sauce, bbq, pesto, or garlic alfredo.
- Toppings
- Meats like pepperoni, Canadian bacon, bacon bacon, pancetta (Italian bacon), smoked pulled pork, grilled chicken, hamburger, Italian sausage, etc.
- Fruits and veggies–traditional things like bell peppers, onions, mushrooms, olives, fresh basil (don’t add this until your pizza has cooked!) and pineapple (we know this is controversial, but it’s popular for a reason), but try some other, less traditional things like roasted red peppers, pepperoncini, and stone fruit like cherries or peaches (I’m dreaming of a peach/bacon pizza with alfredo sauce).
- Shredded mozzarella cheese is a classic, but other great options are dollops of ricotta, fresh mozzarella balls or slices, pepper jack, or smoked gouda.
Tips for Toppings
I suggest going a little lighter than normal on the toppings for a few reasons.
- It will keep the pizzas easy to work with and easy to move around, etc.
- The toppings will cook faster and be sure to be done if they’re not piled on heavy.
- (And probably the biggest reason)–the grill adds so much flavor and texture that you don’t want (or need) to overpower it.
Prepare
Preheat Your Grill
- First, you need to preheat your grill. This is an important step. The rack needs to be nice and hot so the dough will start cooking immediately and the overall temperature needs to be hot in order to act like an oven when the lid is closed. I set my gas grill to medium-high heat and shut the lid.
Gather Everything You’ll Need
- Your toppings (cut, sliced, shredded, etc.), including sauce.
- Olive oil and a brush to brush it on.
- A spoon to spread on sauce.
- A large spatula or pizza peel to flip the pizza
You have to move very quickly while on the grill so everything needs to be prepared and easy to grab. If you’re making a single pizza or using all the same toppings, set up a platter with everything you need and keep it next to the grill, but if you’re having a party, provide bowls or small paper plates and let people pick out what they’d like on their pizza and then hand it to you when it’s their turn.
Prep Your Dough and Get Cooking
Throw all of your preconceived pizza notions out the window. You don’t need to make round pizza. The irregular shaped dough is part of the rustic beauty of grilled pizza. It’s easiest to make several small pizzas, especially if you’re trying this for the first time. If you want to go big, don’t go much larger than 2 9-10″ pizzas. I like to do 4 small pizzas. You get a good 6-8″ pizza that will easily feed one very hungry adult or a couple of hungry kids. Another benefit of doing several smaller pizzas is that you can try out a bunch of different topping combos. Everyone loves having their own!
- You want this dough as thin as you can roll it–not any thicker than 1/4″ inch, but thinner if you can.
- When your dough is flattened out, drizzle a little olive oil on one side and brush it around. If you’d like, sprinkle it with a little garlic or onion salt.
- Now comes the fun part. Toss that puppy (oil side down) straight on the grill and then shut the lid immediately. You’ll want the heat to stay inside so it acts like an oven and cooks the dough. The timing all depends on the heat of the grill and the thickness of the dough. But it usually only takes about 5 minutes or less. Have a spatula handy to lift up the dough and check it. You’ll want to see nice brown grill marks, but avoid burning it. If you can tell that your dough is cooking too fast and too hot, you may want to use indirect heat. For a gas grill with multiple burners, turn off the burner directly under the pizza, but leave the others on. For a charcoal grill, move the charcoal to one side of the grill and place the pizza on the other side.
- These only need a few minutes–Check the bottom for nice grill marks and make sure it’s dry to the touch before flipping. Right before you flip it, brush a little olive oil on the uncooked side.
- As soon as you flip the crust, grab that tray with your toppings and put them on the cooked side right away. Shut the lid again and leave it shut. The second side cooks pretty fast. If the bottom of your pizza is done, but the top still needs to cook, you can place it on an upper rack if you have one.
- Take a peek at the bottom crust and as soon as it’s done and your cheese is all melty, grab a spatula and pull it off. You can place these right onto people’s plates or onto a large cutting board and let everyone snag their pizzas. The only thing left to do is sit back and let everyone tell you how this is the most amazing homemade pizza they’ve ever had!
Storage and Other Tips
- While these pizzas are best cooked fresh, you can certainly save the leftovers. Cover tightly and store in the fridge until ready to eat.
- If you’d like to prep ahead (or make lunch/dinner really easy throughout the week), prep all of your toppings ahead of time so they are easy to pull out of the fridge and pop on a pizza whenever the mood strikes you.
Frequently Asked Questions
I love the smoky char marks grilled pizza gets from cooking directly on the grill grates. If you are feeling apprehensive about cooking directly on the grill, feel free to try cooking your pizza on a lightly oiled piece of foil or a grill mat.
Questions & Reviews
wow, it looks wonderful. I love grilled pizza and I am going to try this one for sure.
Yum! I love grilling pizza. My grill has wide grates and the dough would sag between them before it cooked enough to stiffen up. We solved this by starting the dough on a piece of foil brushed with olive oil, then removing the foil when flipping it to the second side. If you’re making several rounds of pizza you can keep re-using the foil.
A little trick I learned….When I make mine, I roll out each individual pizza on its own little sheet of foil that I’ve sprayed with cooking spray. Then I just flip it over onto the grill, with the foil still attached, and let the first side cook that way. When the dough cooks a little bit it unsticks itself from the foil! I can then peel off the foil and flip the dough onto the foil again for each person to top as they please. It slides off the foil easily to cook the other side.
Thank you for the tip!!!
I’ve never even thought to do this! Can’t wait for grilling season to bring!
I like to mix some garlic bread seasoning in with my olive oil then spread it on. Makes it extra tasty!
For some reason, I can’t get the blue links in this post to work. I am going to attempt to make this for some friends on Conference Sunday, and I am still very much a beginner cook. I especially need to get into the “how to make the pizza dough” link. It would also be nice to see the “garlic alfredo” sauce link. I tried searching these out individually, but had no success. Thanks for all the yummy recipes!
I LOVE grilled pizza! I have never dared to do the whole process on the grill till the other day, though. I’ve always just grilled the dough and finished it in the oven. I decided to try it the other day and it worked! Thanks for the tutorial. I also wanted to share that we actually did this for a get together with friends last night. It was a big hit! I had everyone put all their toppings in a bowl and shape their dough. We had the sauce, olive oil, and cheese at the grill already. Then everyone grilled their own pizzas. I wasn’t sure how it would all go down, but everyone loved it, including the making part. You could tell who was not at all comfortable cooking! It was funny at times. Most people were uncomfortable to some degree since they had never done it, but everyone had fun and loved the pizza. I think we had the lids open too much and the heat too low, though. I will know to do it better in the future. Your tutorial helped a lot!
I made these gluten free and it totally worked! It came out really really well. Thank you so much for this recipe!
All I can say is WOW. Seriously…WOW. I have had this recipe in my favorites for some time now, but I just got a grill. The first thing I cooked on it (that very same night!) was pizza. We are a big pizza family – I make it homemade every Friday night. There is absolutely no comparison between baking it in the oven and cooking it on the grill. Hands down, the grill produces the best tasting crust and pizza I’ve ever eaten. It’s gives it a brick oven type flavor. I have cooked it 4 more times since then – even inviting a group of friends over. It was such a hit! Thanks for this awesome tutorial on grilling pizza! My pizza eating will never be the same!
Amazing, right?? So glad you loved it!
I’ve done this,,,scarey at first, you think it’s just not gonna work but it was downright easy and yummilicious.