Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Cooking Experiment~Grilling Frozen Pizza

This is a cooking experiment that Michael wanted to try. Most of the experiments conducted in our kitchen are done because of my curiosity.  Okay, I take this back, I was like an older child and  planted the thought in Mike's head and convinced him that it would work.  Just like how my sister told me that if I stuck kimi balls  in my ears, it would block out sound. Or when she taught me that if I break my crayons in half, I'd have more.   
On a lazy weekend afternoon, we decided to grill a frozen self-rising pizza.  You've heard of grilling home-made pizza on a grill, but we decided, "hey, why not grill a frozen pizza on the grill?"
Think about it, a grill is essentially an outdoor oven.  Once you close the grill cover, you have an enclosed chamber of  heat.  The difference between an oven and a grill is that in an oven the heat is sourced from the roof of the oven, in a grill, the heat comes from the bottom. Hot air rises, making it a vessel to cook a pizza in.
The main difference I thought we would see is that we would not burn the top of the pizza because the grill did not contain a direct heat source above the pizza.  There was a greater chance for us to burn the crust because of the direct heat coming from the bottom of the grill.
We had to make sure that the pizza was not above a direct flame (this was Mike's brilliant thought). So we started up the grill (with the lid closed) and tried to get it as hot as possible. Once the grill was heated, we quickly placed the pizza on the side of the grill that did not have a direct flame underneath it. We shut the lid and did not open it, even to peek at the pizza. 
I think the directions on the box said to preheat the oven to 400F and bake for 22-25 minutes. We ended up grilling the pizza in about 15 minutes (that's when there was a faint burnt odor coming from the grill). 
Here's a picture of the uncooked pizza.
Here's the final product. Not bad, huh? (part of the bottom crust is burnt, but you cannot see that in the picture). Mike said that he would make this again because he liked the grilled flavor on the pizza. I liked it because 1) it prevented our apartment from heating up because of the oven heat; 2)the cook time for the pizza was faster than in our oven.

3 comments:

K and S said...

that sounds and looks good!

genkitummy said...

We thought that it was pretty good. Much easier than making pizzza to grill from scratch.

Anonymous said...

For thin crust 7-8 minutes with all burners on the lowest possible setting. (keeps our grill at 425 degrees)