The Science of Grate Grilling Part FIVE: GrillGrate Grilled Pizza!

Grilling pizza has never been easier!  The raised rail design of GrillGrates provides the perfect platform to grill pizza and the GrateTool makes it easy to handle and rotate for perfect searing and crispy crust.  Here are a couple of tips to grilling great pizza with GrillGrates:

1. Keep your grill temperature under control at or below 400F. This allows you to grill pizza long enough (10 minutes +) to thoroughly cook the the toppings and melt the cheese without blackening or charring the crust.  The key is how long you can grill pizza, not how hot and fast- unless you like black bottom crust.
2. Use Olive Oil on the bottom side of the pizza crust.  The olive oil helps the crust get super crispy.  Even add a bit of seasoning to the oiled crust for more flavor!
3. Quarter turn the pizza after 3-5 minutes.  Using the GrateTool slightly lift and peek at the crust and see the crust is searing and browning.  Rotate 45 degrees when the sear marks are golden brown.
4. Watch Searing on Bottom of the Crust.  If sear marks are black- you are grilling too hot and at risk of blackening the crust.  Reduce heat.  The sear marks are a great guide to determine your grill's best temperature for grilling great pizza.  My gas charbroil is set on LOW, but the GrillGrate temperature is still 450F when the dome says 350F.  
5. Lower and Slower is Better with Grilled Pizza because it gives you time to fully cook toppings to a golden brown too.  Think bubbly brown cheese!
6. Use MamaMary's Gourmet Pizza Crusts.  They are partially baked, find them in the deli section of your supermarket or at Walmart.  They are fabulous on GrillGrates! 

GrillGrates makes grilling pizza a snap! Pizza is a super platform for all types of grilled pies- even fruit, dessert pizzas and breakfast pizzas!  And don't forget left-over pizzas, BBQ pizzas, white pizzas.  The GrillGrate website has dozens of grilled pizza recipes- let us hear yours!

 

The Science of Grate Grilling

After two years in the market with GrillGrates, we are finally ready to better explain how and why GrillGrates work so much better. A lot of feedback from customers, some insightful reviews from foodies and barbecue pro's has helped us realize how truly different Grill Grates are.

Craig "Meathead" Goldwyn of Amazingribs.com has written the most thorough review of the dynamics of GrillGrates to date. We met recently in Memphis at the NBBQA conference and had the chance to discuss further.

Craig thinks GrillGrates grill more effectively for several reasons:

• Conduction (direct heat) The heat is distributed evenly through the GrillGrate to the top of the rails making for not only outstanding searing but more surface area contact with the food for crispier chicken and crunchy sear marks.
  
• Convection (hot moving air) The valleys between the rails swirl with heat. Juices from meat and vegetables vaporize for moist flavor that rises back into the food. For pizza, pasta, garlic bread this will be a dry heat making for crispy but not burned foods. Pizza crusts and flour tortillas are outstanding from the combination of conduction and convection.
  
• Infrared (reflective heat). The panels themselves radiate heat because there is a lot of surface area that is heated up by the grill.
  

I need a Georgia Tech engineer who can get me some heat motion video! Shelley are you out there?
GrillGrate, Eat Well!
More Grate science to come.

KCBS Tour Grills Grate Pizza

Our friends at KCBS just completed their nationwide tour of BBQ Cookoffs with their last appearance at Talladega, AL. Mike and Chris Peters do an outstanding job with the KCBS Tour demonstrating grilling techniques and products for their sponsors. Their samplings go fast and the crowds are always appreciative. At Talladega they grilled 50 Pizzas and had a sampling frenzy going on!

Chris and Mike took a page out of my playbook with MamaMary's Gourmet Crusts and GrillGrates! They used chicken that had been previously grilled, KC Masterpiece original sauce and the new Smoky Bourbon sauce, and in Chris's words the "FANTASTIC Grill Grates for quick, easy and DELICIOUS PIZZA!!!" Thanks for sending along the pictures and I look forward to seeing you guys on the road next year. Remember to use KCBS as a coupon code to save 20% on all GrillGrate products in our webstore. GrillGrate, Eat Well!

Get Dad Grilling Pizza this FATHER's DAY

Grilled pizza has become a staple at our house and thanks to MamaMary's Gourmet Crusts it has become a staple with many GrillGrate customers too! Now through Father's Day all orders for GrillGrate products will include a coupon for a free package of MamaMary's Crusts- a $5.00 value. Find MamaMary's in the deli section of your favorite supermarket and get grilling great pizza! This link takes you to recipe ideas with MamaMary's crust. Enjoy.


Get Dad Grilling Grate this Fathers Day!

Grilling and Gardening

What a nice weekend! On Saturday I grilled at Kilian Hardware, (est. 1913) on Germantown Ave. in Philadelphia. This was a real Americana Main Street day. It was the first 70 degree sunny day in Philadelphia this spring so we caught it just right. I had some great help from Auntie Nels as she assisted me in grilling pizza (with MamaMary's Gourmet Pizza Crusts) quesadillas, and ravioili. The grilled ravioli is always a show stopper and Nellie directed me to Tallutto's fresh home-made ravioli- which were superb.

The gang at Kilian have been serving the community for several generations, and I enjoyed meeting and working with them and their customers. We introduced GrillGrates to a lot of foks and sold several GrillGrate Gift Kits. Kilian sold a couple of Weber Performers and the 2008 leftover grill that I was grilling on. That lucky couple got my well broken in set of GrillGrates too. I got home late Saturday night to Atlanta expecting storms. The storms never materialized so Sunday morning I hit the yard to mow the lawn and edge the beds. Grilling on Main Street USA on Saturday and Gardening on Main Street on Sunday, life is good.

I've become a Barbecue Groupie!

We had the pleasure of spending 4 days with some of the most passionate, authentic and colorful people at the annual National Barbecue Conference in Austin. The NBBQA is a not for profit organization that serves anyone serious about BBQ: Restaurants, Competition Teams, Caterers and enthusiasts. I took our copy of Peace Love and Barbecue to gather signatures from many attendees who were in the book. I've become a barbecue groupie!

This gang's passion for barbecue is equally matched with their genuine desire to help each other by sharing techniques, recipes, business practices etc. The conference curriculum was outstanding with topics ranging from bottling and marketing your own sauce, branding, pitfalls of running a family business and of course judging and competing in barbecue competitions.

We had the pleasure of grilling BBQ pizzas and quesadillas for lunch one day and had a blast trying out different sauces made by other members. We used a lot of award winning sauces so I'll duck from playing favorites, but the most unusual was a jalepeno ginger jelly from Joy Peppers that we made quesadillas with. They were coming out of the building to taste this delightful treat. Does anyone have any pictures of these grate creations we were grilling? We were so busy grilling and selling :) that I only pulled the camera out once!

I'm excited that many of the attendees purchased GrillGrates for their restaurants and their backyards. We're looking forward to hearing back from you! And a special thank you to the NBBQA judges for The Award of Excellence that GrillGrate received as the best overall specialty product. I am proud that we'll have the NBBQA logo and the award on our product label! We grately appreciate the hospitality of the NBBQA staff: Joe, Ashley and Tyva, and the many new friends we made. The SHED BBQ & Blues Joint put on a diner the last night that was over the top. The cheese and crab grits were to die for. You must visit THE SHED if you are anywhere near the Mississipi coast. Funny thing is my wife has never been a big fan of barbecue, but she sure loves the barbecue crowd! Peace, Love and Barbecue! Great book, great people, great industry. Now we have more friends to stop and visit.

Grilling Pizzas

As a kid in New Jersey I made pizzas at Tony’s Pizzeria in Bridgewater for a couple of years going through college. Those were the disco years and we delivered pizzas on weekends at midnight to a local disco. I enjoyed loading up my orange Chevy Vega with fresh made pizzas. Tony would change shirts- not me I liked being a pizza maker! Flash forward 30 years and I’m making pizzas again. This time to promote GrillGrates our new product. I discovered MamaMary’s gourmet par-baked pizza crusts as we were putting together a recipe guide. At our first tradeshow, MamaMary’s came to the rescue after we ran out crusts on the second day of a nine-day cash and carry show. (Try taking your spouse to a nine-day show that happens over Super Bowl weekend!) We’ve grilled close to 1000 pizzas using MamaMary’s crusts over the past 6 months since MamaMary's FedEx'd dozens of crusts to us in a frozen Harrisburg. We had a grate show and grilled a lot of pizzas AND we had met and sold our first 150 customers! MamaMary’s is now a marketing partner and we include a coupon for a free package of their crust in every GrillGrate kit. We've heard from many of these first customers who have added more GrillGrates to their grill or bought sets for friends. We also had a super recipe posting from Chef Mike a kayak fisherman. But back to the pizza...

I have to tell you that MamaMary's crusts make fabulous grilled pizza! And its a 15-minute start to finish meal, or appetizer, even breakfast pizzas. You don’t have to be a gourmet doughmeister to grill grate pizza! MamaMary’s crusts crisp up just like Tony’s pizzas did. The partially backed crusts take care of the hard part so all that’s left is the fun of designing, building, grilling and eating your pizza. Just typing this makes we want to fire up the grill!