As soon as summer arrives, so does the grilling season! There’s nothing better than heading outside, firing up the grill, and enjoying cooking with the warm sun beaming down on you. However, after a few weeks of burgers, hot dogs, and ribs, you may find yourself getting a little bored of the limited food you can cook on a gas grill.
But it doesn’t have to be this way! If you’re looking to extend your grilling prowess and really impress your friends and family, why not try converting your gas grill into a pizza oven?
It’s remarkably easy to do and you don’t even need to make any permanent changes to your existing grill. You’ll also be able to save a bit of money doing this, as you won’t need to buy a separate pizza oven that only serves one purpose.
Ready to get grilling? Of course, you are! Below we’ll take a look at three ways that you can turn your gas grill into a pizza oven.
1. Use Your Grill’s Grates
This is potentially the easiest way to make homemade pizza on a gas grill. Simply using your gas grill’s cooking grates can be enough to cook your pizza dough, especially if they are cast iron. However, the trick to this lies with the dough. It needs to be particularly thick, otherwise, you may find it burning very quickly or falling through grates as it heats up - a sticky situation that is a nightmare to try and clean up!
With this in mind, if you’re particularly fond of thin crust pizzas, this wouldn’t be the best method to use. However, if you’re happy with a thick crust, it would work perfectly well. You’ll need to keep a close eye on the pizza as it cooks, though.
Flip the dough regularly until the base is cooked on both sides, then you can add your toppings. If you’re adding meat toppings to your pizza, it’s a good idea to cook them separately, then scatter them on top for a final warm through.
2. Use A Pizza Stone
You can now purchase pizza stones that are made specifically for gas grills. This allows you to mimic the environment of a pizza oven, without having to invest in a completely different piece of equipment.
They are really simple to use, as well. Simply place your dough on the pizza stone, spreading it out to the required size, and place the stone on the gas grill. You don’t even need to worry about flipping the pizza dough, as the heat from the stone will cook it without it burning easily.
A pizza stone can be used to make both thin crust and thick crust pizzas, so it’s an ideal tool for large families with different pizza preferences!
It’s very important to make sure you’ve chosen a pizza stone that is suitable for a gas grill, though. If not, it could crack the stone and you’ll be left with the expense of having to replace it.
3. Cover The Grates With Foil
This is a great solution if you’re not keen on the idea of getting a pizza stone, but you’re a little too cautious to grill pizza dough directly on the cooking grates. Simply cover the grates with foil, and cook the pizza dough directly on top.
By doing this, you’ll reduce the amount of direct heat that the dough is exposed to, and this has a couple of benefits. First of all, it stops the dough from burning as easily. Secondly, it raises the temperature of the cooking surface to around 700ºF, which is closer to the temperature a traditional pizza oven cooks with.
You’ll still need to flip the pizza dough every few minutes and make sure that it’s cooked on both sides before adding any toppings. Using this method, you can expect the dough to be ready in 5-10 minutes.
There is a slight downside to this method, though. For it to work, you need to cover your entire grill with tin foil. This means that you won’t be able to grill anything alongside it, so any toppings will have to be made beforehand. You’ll also need to make sure that everybody is happy with pizza, rather than cooking multiple things at once.
How do I turn my BBQ into a pizza oven?
Do you have a charcoal BBQ? You can still turn it into a pizza oven and, even better, it’s a really easy thing to do. All you need to do is create a makeshift brick pizza oven. Here’s how to do it:
Start by covering four bricks with tin foil. Once you’ve done that, stack them on your grill so that you have two stacks of bricks, with two to each stack, spaced about a foot apart.
Next, you need to find something to place across the top of your stacks of bricks. A pizza stone would be the best choice for this, but, in a pinch, you could use a paving slab. Just make sure that the combined weight of the bricks and paving slab don’t cause the cooking grates to buckle.
Finally, place a pizza stone on top of the cooking grates. Once your charcoal is hot enough, you can slide your dough onto the stone and start cooking!
As you’re using a pizza stone, you won’t need to worry about flipping it to cook on both sides, You can also create thin crust and thick crust pizzas.
One of the best things about this method is that it really recreates the feeling of using an authentic, traditional pizza oven. The temperature won’t get as hot and will be around the 500ºF mark, which means it’ll take slightly longer to cook.
But it won’t take more than 15 minutes per pizza. And, while you wait, you can enjoy a cold beer along with the fresh air and the feeling of the sun on your face.
