How to Grill Pizza With Kenji Lopéz-Alt | ChefSteps

[Music] M Grill and [Music] pizza I love every kind of pizza there is but there is one pizza that I've never had and I've never really made at all and that's the grilled pizza but today I've got Kenji Lopez Al teaching me everything I need to know on how to make a great grilled pizza and we're going to show you all the secrets [Music] too grilled pizza yeah grilled pizza so this was actually my first full-time restaurant job out of college was grilling Pizza we were trained by by one of the chefs at um alforno in Providence Rhode Island which is where they invented grilled pizza I love grilled pizza because it's extremely simple right like you don't need any kind of special equipment all you need is a grill and you get these sort of charred light results that you get out of like a sort of sort of like a neapolitan pizza you know you get that you get those kind of leopard spots and you get that really light texture it's like good for socializing you know it's really easy to share these take about 3 or 4 minutes to make once you start cooking them and so you have a group of friends around you pull out one pizza after another you each take a bite and you can all just be kind of hanging around the grill you can do it all in one day and the actual sort of Hands-On part is pretty minimal uh so we're going to do all that and we're going to eat some more pizza I love it let's do it all right so we're just going to jump into mixing D we don't have to do let's do it let's start with the D all right so we've got uh AP flour this is going to make enough for three pizzas I think it's 300 G of flour yeast sugar to help with the burn Browning and is that the right measured amount of salt seems like a lot does it how many salt does it double check yeah 7.5 G 7.5 we can try it again it looks like probably maybe yeah where's our scales maybe it's extra light and fluffy kosher yeah on W all right Perfect all right so we're just going to very briefly mix our dry ingredients salt is one of those things this seems like a lot of Salt N it's the perfect amount yep it's perfect all right so now we're going to add our water and olive oil so I think I think this is a 61% hydration dough so that's 61 * 3 so 183 gram of water but anywhere between sort of 60 and 65 will do and and honestly like you know this style of Pizza is pretty forgiving so it's like you can you can easily make it with a store-bought dough so just a little stiffer just to hold onto the grill unlike say like a New York or neitan where you're stretching It Out by hand and you really need that dough to be a little bit looser like this one we're going to roll it out with a rolling pin so actually having a little bit stiffer helps it and and then once it goes on the grill we don't want it like drooping in and and settling you know um so we're going to basically just mix it just until it comes together you could just let the stain mixer go and and knead it all but it works a lot better if you let the flow hydrate a little bit all right so now we're basically like in the cohesive ball we're just going to let that turn that off just make grab up any sort of excess flour we basically just have to let this sit for about 15 minutes okay yeah and in that time the FL flow is going to fully hydrate there's going to be some enzymatic action that breaks breaks it down a little bit the auto leas so that it your when when you go to knead it later it'll form your dough a lot faster make like a said stronger dough the dough looks quite different from what it was and especially if you touch it like before it was kind of Shaggy and now it's really wet and sticky giving looks like a dough yeah so now at this point it should mix Prett pretty easily so we want to let this go just until it's kind of nice and smooth and silky um you don't need to let it go till it like fully passes like a window Paine test or anything but you want it to feel nice and smooth and silky so what I'm actually looking for here generally is that when I pull it off the hook if it comes off like super cleanly and kind of only to itself like that's sort of a sign that the gluten developed enough if it kind of Tears too much go a little bit longer I'll give maybe another minute or two all right let's see how we are now looking pretty good so now we're going to basically just dump this out into a very lightly oiled surface little bit oil on our hand so it doesn't stick and so now we're just going to make it into a ball the way I do it is I I pick it up like that and I with my right hand I I basically the idea is I'm trying to form like a skin in you know and so I'm tucking all of the edges into the back here so I kind of push with that hand and then pinch with this one and kind of work my way around it and at this point you know it's not as smooth as it's going to be when it's done but we're just trying to get it into sort of a nice tight shape and we're going to do what's called the bulk fermentation here so we're going basically just let that sit uh for we'll cover it and we'll let it sit for about 3 hours until it's roughly doubled in volume so this is one that was made earlier um so this is basically what it's going to look like it might you know sometimes it might puff a little more this one kind of spread out a little wide this one's still kind of got this rough cottage cheesy surface whereas this one is really nice and sort of smooth so that that's the big difference we're looking for and that's sort of an indication that the yeast has done his work the gluten has developed and uh we're ready to love it we're going to now just divide this into three I like to set it up into like a didn't see that coming I would my brain just automatically goes into like the third of the ball this I prefer I prefer doing like a a little ruler I like that a little ruler um and then we're going to do the exact same thing with these you want to do that one this one yeah so we're just going to same same type of balling up as the previous one just on a smaller scale and so for these ones I like to you know for the final shaping once I get the sort of little belly button there I plop them down and you know do one of these tuck jobs and then you can finish it off with a little either a one-handed or depending on the size of your hand a little one-handed or two-handed cage roll you know and that's it and so nice and round if it starts out round it rolls out smoothly you get like a little belly button on the bottom that's okay the idea here is that we want to sort of create this tight skin around it so that when we start spreading it out you still get this really you know that skin stretches out and so you get like a nice even spread whereas if you kind of just do like a you know like a Play-Doh ball like this you end up with like sort of Scrappy bits that stick out and then when you try and roll it out like it's more likely to tear finish a little bit of oil pop them in you do want to make sure you leave enough space that they can uh just like what happened there they're going to rise a little they're going to spread out a little um if they're too close they're going to turn into one big ball that's it now we just let that sit uh until those are ready to go which will be again this is a pretty forgiving one so it could be you can do it in 3 hours you could do it in 6 hours and you're probably going to be fine there's two fermentation steps right two resting steps so the first one is the bulk fermentation the main point of that is to allow flavor to develop allow some more gluten to De to develop um and so you really that's really for sort of structural and flavor issues the second proofing is is for shaping right so the final proof you you shape the dough the way you want it you get those nice round balls and then they spread out become stretchable and mainly the reason we're letting them rest is because every time you work with dough it tightens up and then you have to give it some time to relax again like those very uh touchy if we roll it right now it's just going to oh yeah yeah exactly yeah it'll it'll just it'll be like elastic it'll pull right back in so the second second step is for shaping and then giving it enough time to relax that you can stretch it out nicely love it so next up garlic oil so this gets brushed on the dough before we grill it real simple just garlic olive oil and a hand blender yeah everything's real simple Pizza is real simple right it's all techniqu I love it I'm just going to pulse it a little bit you know we don't want this to be like an emulsified puree we want like little chunky bits of garlic in there and this is raw now and it will get cooked a little bit cuz it's going to be on the surface that'll hit both sides of the gr exactly yeah you do want to be a little bit careful you know CU garlic and garlic and oil so garlic can have botulism spores and when it's submerged under oil and aerobic environment so it's possible that you'll uh you know develop some baddies in here if you let it sit too long so so so make it the day you're going to use it a couple days just don't let it sit around sauce time sauce time yeah so sauce is real simple it's just tomatoes and salt is this a grilled pizza sauce if I was making like the simplest New York style pizza or even like an the apolon pizza just tomatoes and salt I think you know simplest works fine so the idea here is we're going to crush these Tomatoes by hand you know we want something really rustic these are Bianca denapoli really good ones from California um you know you can get like a a dop San Marano something like that if you want I prefer using whole peeled tomatoes and then crushing them by hand because you get more control over the texture and generally you know whole peeled tomatoes have a better texture in general because you know if you buy something like a diced tomato it's got the calcium chloride and it it uh kind of doesn't really break down very easily whereas whole tomatoes will to Sauce even with out of the B oh yeah that's why I was I was trying and poke a hole in each one first so that it doesn't just like squirt up in my face if you have tomatoes that are very watery you can you can you can drain them just get some of the little bit of the excess liquid out but these ones look pretty good would you let this sit for a little bit or I would just like I mean this one I like the consistency but if I had the other Tomatoes I would give it a few shakes and then and then we're good to go in a Neapolitan or New York Pizza the sauce is going to cook on top of the pizza because you get heat from the top yeah a grilled pizza doesn't really cook very much so the texture you have here is basically the texture and so you don't want anything watery that's going to spread all over the pizza um so just salt we're going to season it and that's it and then we're kind of good to go my hands were clean at some point they aren't anymore all right so now we're going to slice the scallions which are sort of the final garnish on the pizza it's just part of the style I think I start by splitting the scallions into these sort of you know two or three inch segments and then just with the very tip of the knife going to Slit them just on one side so that you can open them up like that so you can do that with all these and you know you can find a way that's comfortable for you to do that if you don't want your scalling looking perfectly like hairs you don't have to do any of this so stack them up and then fold them so that they don't curl up on themselves instead of doing this sort of up and down which kind of crushes cells you know you want to do like as much slicing motion as possible so using sort of the full length of the blade all right and so then once you get those kind of hair like things you dump them in the uh ice water the cells are going to absorb some water they're going to stiffen up um and then that's going to come the scallion to curl um if you don't want to wait you know spend all that time doing that which I generally don't at home I would just take a scallion like this trim off the bottom don't bother with the slitting and just kind of do as much you know cut it out as sharp a bias as you can yeah and it's not going to look as good but it will be a lot faster and get you like 90% of the way there we're grilling some pizzas we are so you got your workstation yeah that you like to have let's chat through it real quick yeah so the difference between grilled pizza and most other Pizza one of the differences is that it gets topped while it's cooking yeah not beforehand cuz you got to cook that first side first so you want to make sure that all of your toppings are close to your grill all right so that that's like the part that's closer to the got got um we're going to roll out our pizza here we got a tray with parchment paper on it if you get like really nervous about rolling dough and cooking it and trying to keep that of everything you can actually pre-roll this dough um just lay it you know up to maybe 15 minutes to half an hour before lay it out on the parchment uh stack another piece of parchment to you can stack them up and have them ready to go maybe a little flour oil oh yeah yeah for sure flour yeah you want flour if you uh yeah if you you let them sit too long and that flour hydrates it will eventually stick so you know 15 30 minutes is probably fine all right so here's our dough you can see it's like really nice and relaxed very soft doesn't bounce back when you poke it keeps its dimples pizza dough down um I got you know a fair amount of flour here um which is fine like you you know this type of pizza with something like a New York and nearin where it's going to end up cooking directly on the stone um you don't want to use too much bench flour because you can get that sort of burnt flour flavor um this one we're going to kind of shake it get shaking around a lot it's going on a grill that excess flow is just going to fall off so it's fine to use excess bench flour here and it makes a lot easier to roll it out so I put in a little pile of flow I like to use a tapered French rolling pin because I find just gives you a little more control over the the final shape right so I'm going to do get it going a little bit in both directions and then once we're sort of uh about to there then I then I'll just continue going without you know just moving the rolling pin instead of the the dough I mean so when the dough is nice and relax it it'll stretch out and if you see it like really pulling back in it's like probably a sign that you didn't let it rest long enough but we're going to just shake off a little bit of the excess flour here so that's that's about it it's going to you know so I'm I'm making it a little bit smaller than it will be when it you know it'll stretch out a little bit as it gets on the grill so garlic oil kind of like you know scoop up a little garlic chunks salt all right so now we're going to pick this up and we're going to drape it right over the grates you know at the beginning the dough is going to be pretty slack a little bit hard to pick up and move around um so what you can do with a Weber kettle let's say your coals are too hot and you're afraid it's going to start burning you can you know rotate this around so that your so that your dough ends up on the cooler side of the grill so we're going to let it basically just sit here couple moments we're going to see that those bubbles popping up that's an indication that uh the dough is setting up and then once it's kind of firm on that bottom side it becomes a lot easier to work with I love that you don't hear that sound with a pizza very often oh and at this point we can actually brush that other side of with garlic also you don't want to do this right when it goes on the grill CU otherwise you end up like pushing it through the grill grates you need to let it develop a little structure first right right also salt and pepper the uh the one thing you're going to pretty much always notice is that the center Cooks a lot faster than the edges and so you can see like once it starts to cook I like to give each sort of edge a little bit of extra time over the hottest part of the grill I think we're pretty much uh I feel like that's the opposite of most pizzas the center's cooking faster yeah it's the opposite yeah yeah but there we go that's uh beautiful that one's pretty nicely even Brown yeah our coals are on the cooler side now so you know the hotter your coals are sort of the more uneven Browning you get so when they're cooler you get a nice sort of golden brown um with some charred spots when they're really hot you get more of that sort of leopard spotting and now your Temptation might be to just let it sit there and like go have a beer go chat with your friends whatever you don't want to let it sit too long because you know what happens with pizza and well with any dough is that if it's hot but not hot enough that it's like you know cooking it's going to eventually moisture is going to come out of it and instead of being instead of having that sort of contrast between the crackly outside and the soft interior you end up with a saying that's crunchy all the way through like a cracker um so you definitely don't want to let it sit too long I'm doing a combination of Fontina and mozzarella here although you know any any sort of good melting cheese will work I would avoid something like fresh mozzarella cuz it's super watery you'll get a puddle on your pizza and a little bit of peino cheese we're putting on first so it has an opportunity to melt as far as our toppings go this one is just a simple one we're going to take those tomatoes and kind of dollop them on here you're not like no yeah it's going to be quite different from a New York and near this is brand new to me I see where you're going with this just like a good you know like a neopolitan pizza I feel like this is one of those things that really just like celebrates simple simple ingredients and like good technique and really not much else you know by the time you get to that second side it's pretty easy to just kind of move around the grill and just kind of Glide over it what I actually find interesting is that that first side you always get more even Browning on that first side because once those bubbles start popping up you know and they and the dough thins out around those bubbles that's why like on that second side you get a lot more of the sort of Darker spots because the dough had bubbled up and it's a little bit thinner there but that looks about done to me so I'm going to just uh finish it off beautiful with a little bit of Basil chiffonade um and when I do this basil I like to throw it over the pizza but also make sure to get some like into the coals because it smells really good oh my God it's like the um yeah does smells so good sizzling fajita platter of pizza all right probably a safer way to do that oh that's beautiful all right and we're going to finish it off with the there's a scallion M all right wait are we cutting it I want to hear that crunch I like to I like to party cut these guys bunch of small pieces would I like oh look at this yeah kind of can't levers out which is nice M good engineering yeah it's beautiful Cheers Cheers buddy thank you who same day the contrast the texture in the dough is awesome moist mhm yeah and that thing it's hard to that's the one of those things that's hard to do with indoor ovens like any anything that's not this extreme high heat it's hard to get that real nice contrast as far as like uh pizza making at home goes it's one of the best ways to do it because it's like it's completely entry level you don't need any kind of special equipment other than a grill I mean every step in it is really relatively simple once you understand the process and you can even do it on the same day you can do it with store about do it's just like a really easy way to make new friends or keep old ones you [Music] know there you have it grilled pizza Ki as all dude thank you so much thank you we're going to have the dough recipe on Chefs the full techniques all that sort of stuff all the extra tips and tricks Kenji Lopez Al thank you so much brother this is amazing my first grilled pizza and it's [Music] amazing if you post a picture of a pizza and you don't get a comment saying that your pizza was burnt and then it was underdone subscribe to our Channel and visit chefsteps.com for more tips recipes guides and tools to help you level up in the kitchen [Music] n

Channel: ChefSteps

Views: 68,006

Keywords: chefsteps, cooking, modernist, cuisine, kenji lopez-alt, pizza, grilling, dough, outdoor cooking

Id: OGn6EsOnX50

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2023