So I love my Big Green Egg, and I really like pizza.  Ergo, I keep making grilled pizza, over and over again.  I try to make big batches of pizza dough (part wholewheat, sometimes part semolina), using a long, slow, cold ferment:  the best technique for thin crust pizza.  Frozen dough blobs allow me to satisfy the pizza craving in a time window only a few minutes greater than that of pizza delivery.  The dough defrosts overnight in the refrigerator, or in an hour or two at room temperature.

This week’s pizza craving sent me rummaging through the freezer (I’m trying to get it pared down for the season of impending doom, but I haven’t really made a dent).  Sadly, no dough turned up beneath the lavash, methi paratha, dumplings, andouille, tasso, black pepper bacon, frozen limas, and turkey burgers…and my usual recipe requires at least 12-18 hours lead time for proper fermentation.

Rose Levy Berenbaum came to the rescue:  her Bread Bible (p 190) has a nice recipe for a (relatively) quick dough, ready in just two hours with no kneading.  Stir together 3/4 cup plus 1 T unbleached AP flour, 1/2 tsp instant yeast, 1/2 tsp sugar, 1/2 tsp salt, and 1/3 cup water with a wooden spoon until a shaggy dough forms.  Pour 4 tsp olive oil into another bowl and plop the dough blob into the oiled bowl, turning it over to coat.  Allow the dough to rise at room temp for 1 hour.  At this point, the dough can be refrigerated for up to 24 hours (remove it from the fridge at least an hour before using).  I simply deflated it after an hour and gave it another hour’s rise at ambient temperature.  Once it had almost doubled, I pressed it out onto parchment paper, topped it sparingly, then grilled it on a screaming-hot pizza stone for 10 minutes.

It was quite tasty, though definitely NOT thin crust.  Next time, I’ll leave out the sugar and stir some olive oil into the dough at the beginning.