Breakfast Pizza and Grilled Pizza but not Grilled Breakfast Pizza

At Nino Salvaggio's and many other grocery stores, you can buy raw pizza dough - usually in the freezer section. I like Nino's version and have used it a few times for making grilled pizzas. Who hasn't seen an episode on Food Network where some one is quickly throwing on some dough and whipping up a delicious-looking grilled pizza? I always saw that and wondered - maybe we should try it?? Well you should! It's not too difficult, especially if you buy pre-made dough. I heard you can even go to your local pizzeria and ask to buy their dough so that might work, also. Look, I've also made homemade pizza dough. It was a nice experience, recipe was only OK so I'd like to try another but on this day I didn't have time for that.

We had some great visitors - Gwen and Tom - over for dinner last weekend and The Husband and I both thought of "grilled pizzas!" for a dinner idea. We always make some BBQ chicken pizza - shredded or diced chicken seasoned to your liking, bacon, onions, bell peppers, BBQ sauce, mozzarella cheese, and we also made a regular supreme pizza - bacon, onions, bell peppers, and fennel sausage, mozzarella cheese and regular pizza sauce. I also had some fresh basil from my herb garden on top but I forgot to sprinkle on oregano, darn!

The method for grilled pizzas is this - thaw / let your pizza dough come to room temp - oil the bowl and loosely cover and let it rise/come to room temp. This took 3-4 hours for a fully frozen pizza dough. One dough that I buy from Nino's makes 4 personal-sized pizzas. I was concerned this might not be exactly enough so I took a half of another pizza dough and made 2 more -- I knew this would be too much but leftover pizza isn't so bad!

When the pizza dough is room temp, cut into 4 chunks and roll/stretch out the pizzas. You can make a super large pizza if you want. I didn't have a lot of time to let the dough rest and I know that makes the stretching easier, but I love crisp thin pizzas so a little more time and rolling will probably help. Use olive oil to grease the tops and bottoms of the pizza crusts. I usually put them on squares of parchment papers and use cookie sheets to move them outside to the grill.

Turn you grill on to med-high heat - nice and hot and pre-heated. The dough will seem too soft and I thought "that will sink between the grates" .. and it seems like it will but grill one side of the pizza doughs for 2-3 minutes or until charred to your liking. You'll see they are puffing up and perfect when you check on them. Remove the one-side grilled crusts back onto your parchment paper/cookie sheets, grilled side up.

Now take all your pizza crusts inside and put your toppings on the grilled side of the crusts. I had my crusts half-grilled and waiting - this is a good stopping point for a do-ahead dinner. Have your guests arrive and top their own half-grilled pizzas - make a "pizza bar" with all of the different toppings laid out. All you have to do next is pop the crusts back on the grill to char up the raw side of the crusts for another 2-3 minutes and voila - grilled pizza! Close the lid to the grill too, and your cheese will melt and all will be well in the world. I pre-cook my onions and peppers and things just because the crusts aren't on the grill for too long.

So - I should have taken more pictures of the grilled pizza... I just have this one photo of what we reheated for lunch the next day (it was tasty after baking in the oven for a while!)

I do have pictures of what I made the next day with the 1/2 of the dough I had left over. Breakfast pizza! I have never made this before or even eaten it. People order it from Holden's in Milford and bring it into work but I'm always on a diet or not there and miss out. Anyway, there seem to be 2 types of breakfast pizzas. One where the eggs are beaten and then they turn into a scrambled egg topping and one where the eggs are more like a sunny side up. I asked The Husband and the choice for us was sunny-side up style so we could get that runny yolk.

I still had leftover toppings from the night before which was so helpful. Bacon, sausage, cheese, onions, peppers... all good stuff. I made half with a little pizza sauce too because I didn't know if that would be good or not.

I followed the method as noted here on The Kitchn - preheated my oven to 500 degrees. I prepared the dough as I did for grilling - olive oil and rolling/stretching out the dough into one big pizza. I sprinkled all the toppings on except the eggs. I placed it in the oven for 5 minutes. After that I slipped 4 eggs on top of the pizza and put it back in the oven until the eggs were set. It took about 10 minutes when it was all said and done.

The results were delicious and The Husband agreed, we'd definitely make this again and having some extra pizza dough on hand is not a bad thing at all. Yum! Hope you try it and enjoy.