Cooking a tasty pizza on vacation doesn’t mean tying yourself to a traditional kitchen. You can cook it on your trusty grill, or even a properly-prepared campfire with a cooking grate. All the ingredients you need include refrigerated pizza dough, pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese plus a variety of tasty toppings. The secret is to thoroughly heat the grill and then brown the crust on both sides before adding toppings. Let the cheese and toppings melt together and voila!
Tools of the trade
You’ll need a few items to get this pizza right. The first is a grill, or at the very least a heat source and a grate. If you’re not bringing a grill, many campsites offer firepits or fire rings that come with a built-in cooking grate above the heat. You can also bring your own portable campfire grill rack, as long as it’s sturdy enough to support your dough.
For fuel, you don’t have to use charcoal like a traditional “grill.” Instead, you can turn your campfire into an outdoor wood-fired pizza kitchen! No matter what you choose to use for heat, you’ll want to carefully prepare your heat source before you start cooking to avoid turning your pizza dough into a charred mess. This could mean starting your campfire well in advance of cooking time and then arranging the coals in an indirect or direct heating method, depending on your preferences. Check out some potential heat source placement ideas such as using indirect heat and direct heat, or a combination.
Another helpful tool will be a good set of metal or other heat-resistant long tongs, so you can easily grab the hot pizza dough and give it a careful flip while it’s “baking” on the grill. (More on that below.) A good knife for slicing your pizza is also helpful, as well as a large cutting board.
Making your own dough
You don’t have to cook from scratch, but it’s a fun challenge for a true culinary treat. Try this recipe (along with grilling techniques) for a tasty grilled pizza. If you do choose to make your own dough, make sure to pack ingredients ahead of time that could be tricky to source from your campsite, like yeast and flour. (Not too many campers will have a cup of flour to spare in their camp kitchens.) If you want to go an easier route, packrefrigerated pizza dough in your RV before you set off down the road. Follow any instructions on the package if you need to let the dough warm up to room temperature before baking.
Never seen a grilled pizza before? Check out this quick video How To:
The key is in the dough flip
While a traditional oven-baked pizza gets added to the oven with cheese and toppings from the start, when you grill pizza dough, you don’t have as much help from heat on the top. You’ll need to follow instructions (like our two samples above) in recipes for adding dough to the grates, then flipping at least once to get it cooked on all sides. Only after the dough is cooked all over do you add sauce, sprinkle cheese, and lay on your preferred toppings.
Buon appetito!
