Recipe: Grilled Pineapple Pizza

We’ll get to the grilling in a moment but let’s talk about about the pizza dough for a second. I consulted my favorite bread cookbook, Peter Reinhart’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice, for some pizza dough inspiration. I used the basics of his Pate Fermentée recipe but added a few tweaks. Perfect pizza dough!

Adapted Reinhart/Bread Baker’s Apprentice Pizza Dough
1 cup King Arthur White Whole Wheat flour
1 cup AP flour
1/2 cup vital wheat gluten flour (I use Bob’s Red Mill)
1 tbsp. kosher salt
1/2 tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. instant yeast (I use SAF Red Instant Yeast)
1-1.5 cup water, room temperature

Mix all of your ingredients together starting with all the dry ingredients and adding water as needed. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface (I’m loving our new granite countertops for this!) and knead for about 5 minutes. Put the dough in an oiled bowl and cover with a towel. I let mine rise for 2 hours, kneaded again for 5 minutes, and let it rise for another 2 hours. It’s done when it’s light, airy, and fluffy.

Now, on to the grilled pineapple and the grilled pizza!

I prepared the pineapple (cut down a whole pineapple into 8 strips) and the dough….

…while John readied the grill.

We got our charcoal going in our Weber Chimney Starter.

We oiled up the pineapple with EVOO and used our smaller “test” pieces of dough to start.

John couldn’t wait and ate the test dough the second it was cooked.

The larger pieces of dough went down as we continued to char up the pineapple.

Here’s where this experience started to turn into a bust. It took forever to cook the pineapple and dough because the charcoals cooled down a bunch and it started to get dark out. Ugh! So we opted to finish the pizzas up in the oven in the house. Not a huge deal, we still got the pineapple and dough grilled up perfectly. Everything was hot anyways so we piled on the sauce, cheese, and toppings and baked for about 10 minutes.

The pizza was great. The dough was crunchy and the pineapple was perfectly sweet and savory! Definitely a recipe to make again just earlier in the day I think.