Big Green Egg Pizza's 

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Once you’ve tried pizza cooked on the Big Green Egg you’ll never cook it another way. Thin and crispy with a lovely smokey flavour, as though it had been cooked in Italy.

My pizzas were so popular that I ended up buying a second Big Green Egg so I could cook pizza for kids and proper meat dishes for the adults.

You’re going to need a decent pizza stone, the Big Green Egg one is amazing. A pizza peel is also a necessity. 

Pizza Sauce

Ingredients

  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 400g tin of plum tomatoes
  • 1 teaspoon of sea salt (Maldon sea salt is my preference)
  • 1 tablespoon mixed Italian herbs (available from the herb stall on Cambridge market)
  • Freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 2 tablespoons tomato puree 

Method

  1. Finely chop or crush the garlic and add to the cold olive oil in a small saucepan.
  2. Heat the oil and garlic over a medium heat until the garlic is cooked. Don't let it burn or it will taste bitter.
  3. Add all the other ingredients and simmer over a low heat for an hour.
  4. Chop any big chunks of tomato still in the sauce to make it smoother. A few small chunks are good. Don't blend it. 

Pizza Base

Ingredients

  • 1 batch of Basic Bread dough - see my recipe. This will have gone through the first prove and have been knocked back.
  • Rice or semolina flour for dusting your surface.

Method

  1. Take a handful of the dough and roll out so it is very thin, 2-3mm. Do this on a floured surface with a floured rolling pin. 

I flour the surface with rice or semolina flour. These flours don't absorb water easily so your pizza is much less likely to stick to the surface. It also gives your pizza a bit of a crunch. In some ways it’s a secret ingredient that will set your pizzas apart.

Putting your pizza together

Ingredients

  • Pizza dough
  • Pizza sauce
  • Mozzarella (try and get the mozzarella in bags as opposed to grated. No need to get buffalo mozzarella though, probably a bit posh).
  • Toppings of your choice.

Method

  1. Coat your rolled dough in a thin layer of the pizza sauce. Don't put on too much, your pizza will go soggy.
  2. Drop on randomly chunks of mozzarella. You don't need to cover the whole pizza, it will be too gooey.
  3. Add toppings of your choice, leaving the ones you want to brown like onions and pepperoni until last. Don't overdo it, less is more here.
  4. Put into a preheated oven or Big Green Egg at 350C or more directly onto the pizza stone (this should have been allowed to get very hot beforehand). Cook for 7 mins until the topping is cooked. You dough should be crispy.

I cook pizzas with the EGG setup with a plate setter in the feet down position and the baking stone directly on top.

To get your pizza into and out of the oven use a pizza peel, a wooden one to put the pizza in and a metal one to take it out. The standard wooden peel is good but the Super Peel is excellent. I imported mine from Canada a few years ago but you can now buy them in the UK at BakeryBits.co.uk. They're worth every penny.

Let me know what your favourite toppings are.

© Nic Williams 2014