Jul 20, 2010

Grilled Artisan Bread

Background: For Christmas, I received a book about making artisan bread in five minutes a day (I highly recommend it). You can read my progress thus far here, in reverse chronological order.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try making grilled pizza (with the Bob Evans Wildfire BBQ chicken), and since I only use artisan bread dough for pizza these days (because it’s already in my fridge), I decided to grill that. The book has instructions for grilling the dough, but it calls for the use of a pizza stone in the grill. I might try that method still, but I decided to go for putting the dough directly onto the grill.

The verdict: Messy, but delicious.

I used olive oil instead of cornmeal, but the dough didn’t slide off my baking sheet the way I’d hoped it would, so I had to lift the pizza, with all of the toppings on, and place it on the grill. I lost a little bit of cheese and chicken, but fortunately, I’d made the pizzas pretty small – no more than six inches in diameter – so they were manageable.

And worth it. The parts of the dough that didn’t get burned tasted amazing.

But yeah, I burned some of it. I figured since the temp in the oven is always over 450 degrees, I should have the grill on high. Um, not so much. It turned out to be too high, but trial and error is my favorite method of learning to cook ;)

The very next day, I decided to just grill some bread, so I made some rounds about four inches in diameter and one inch thick. I plopped those directly onto the grill too, with the heat around medium high. The temperature gauge on the grill said 350 degrees, but I don’t trust it – the dough shouldn’t have burned the way it did at 350. I forgot to keep track of the cooking time, but I don’t think it took more than ten minutes.

The grilled bread was so tasty, it’s now my favorite way to cook the artisan dough. It's more of a hassle than baking it in my toaster oven, which I still do several times a week. But when the weather is not too hot, I can see myself grilling bread every day.

(Sorry about the lack of pictures. It was such an experiment, because not only was it my first time grilling bread, but my first time grilling ever, that it never even occurred to me to grab the camera. Next time.)


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4 comments:

Some Lucky Dog said...

I bought the book after reading about it and your bread adventures here! We love it and haven't bought bread at the store since I started baking it. Thanks!

Chief Family Officer said...

@Lucky Dog - You're welcome! Thank you for sharing that with me - I'm so glad :)

Connie said...

Can you send me the Artisan Bread Dough recipe. I'd love to try it.

Chief Family Officer said...

@Connie - You can find the recipe here: http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/?p=1616.