Any reader of this newsletter will know the Venn diagram of my home cooking will show a monster overlap of delicious and easy. And right in the middle of that crossover sits one of my favorite weekend meals: grilled pizza.
I am the product of Western Kentucky and Southern Indiana, an overlooked pizza hotbed (in my opinion) home to a style of pizza known as “Una Pizza.” I grew up eating at beloved, locally owned pizza joints with names like Turoni’s Forget-Me-Not-Inn, RocaBar and Deerhead.
The pizza is a cousin to the thin and crispy style commonly found in Chicago taverns and parts of New Jersey, where it is known as “Bar Pizza.” It is crowned with simple toppings and cut in squares, called “the party cut.” (Best with a large pitcher of cold beer.)
This pizza is delicious but not precious. It is inexpensive, and it’s my favorite style. (We even serve a tweaked version of it at Melfi’s, my Italian restaurant.)
Making pizza at home rarely seemed to me like an “easy” thing to do. I have at least six cookbooks with an emphasis on pizza, and the common theme among them is an obsessive attention to detail that I just do not possess when it comes to getting dinner on the table. There is NO FUCKING WAY I would ever spend two days making my own dough at home.
Hats off to the people that have the patience, but at the end of the day, I’m actually a lazy cook, and I love a shortcut. I have a firm belief that most people make their lives more complicated in the kitchen for very little return on the investment of time and energy. Perhaps going down the pizza dough rabbit hole would give me a perfect pie, but my lazy shortcut gives me a pie that still registers as really, really satisfying (and perhaps just as good).
My dough comes together in 10 minutes rather than 48 hours, it requires no yeast (and I never can find the one packet of yeast I bought years ago when I need it), and it doesn’t need to rise. You mix it, you roll it, you cook it.
And finally, as a natural skeptic of kitchen tools that have one use, I just don’t want to keep and store a big pizza stone that I have to unearth every time I want to make pizza for the family. But I do have a propane grill, I love it, I use it constantly, and let me tell you: it makes a damn fine (and often misshapen) pizza pie.
And now I'm going to tell you how I do it.
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