As with most friendships of any duration, my good friend Jay and I have accrued a decent collection of jokes that we always seem to find our way back to. Many of these topics for the two of us involve hypothetical food items that we fully expect will one day be the "next big thing." The most commonly discussed item in this genre is the ultimate breakfast food; It has yet to be named, but the basic blueprint involves making French toast out of pancakes. Jay contends that this could be taken a step further by somehow working waffles into the mix, while I think that may be pushing the laws of nature -- and breakfast -- a bit too far.

Another one of our frequent topics of conversation has been the mythical grilled pizza. Men love grilling, and men love pizza. What could be better than bringing these two things together to form the perfect meal? I know this isn't quite as exotic as the french wafflecake (we're still working on the name), but it's something we've always been curious about taking a stab at. Now, I'm not talking about grilling a prepared pizza shell with toppings, or even buying some fancy pizza grill stone and just using a grill for the cooking vehicle. I'm talking about placing dough on the grill and cooking up a pizza right there, start to finish. Earlier this week, we finally took a crack at it.

I'll confess: We didn't do this completely from scratch. We thought it would be good to have a couple different options ready, in case it took a few tries to figure it out. We were prepared to make the dough ourselves, but for what we expected would be our first attempt we used some prepared dough that we had on hand from Gordon Food Service. Generally, this dough is great and we use it all the time, but I wasn't very optimistic about its performance on the grill due to it's wet consistency. It's a pretty "loose" dough that I expected to sink right into the grill plates. Luckly, Jay had a pizza sheet with an attached handle that we were able to use, so we managed to avoid that problem. Jay did his best "authentic Italian pizza maker" impression, tossed the pizza in the air a few times, got it spread out on the oiled pizza tray, and then it was out the grill.

Our plan was to turn the flame up as high as it would go and shut the lid to get a nice high temperature going. Then we put the dough in for 4-5 minutes -- just enough to get a few large bubbles in the middle of the dough and a very slight darkening on the bottom -- then we gave it the first flip. Once flipped, we added our sauce and cheese and stuck it back in to finish.

Another 4-5 minutes later and we had a nice browning of the top crust and a healthy char on the bottom. The bottom edge got ever-so-slightly burned, but really it was an excellent first attempt.

The end result was a very-thin-in-the center margherita pizza. A little more thickness would have been nice, but it turned out a lot better than either of us really expected. We did have another half of the pizza dough ball leftover, so we tried for a second pie. Unfortunately, the dough had gotten a little too tough, and we weren't able to roll it very thin. We cooked it up anyway and what resulted was a sort of personal pan pizza / pizza bagel that was very different from the first pizza, but equally surprisingly in how well it turned out.

So the final verdict was that grilling pizza was a lot easier than expected. The whole process was actually a lot quicker than baking it in the oven, so I think this is something we'll certainly try again. If you're feeling a little adventurous, give a shot on your own and let me know how it turns out.