Simple yet incredibly delicious grilled pizza topped with grill-roasted sweet peppers, sliced nectarines, ricotta cheese, and garden herbs.
Grilling notes: You'll want to cook the pizza dough over high heat first, then move them to a cooler zone. If you're using charcoal, this means getting your coals hot and then banking them to one side. For gas, set one side to high (or medium high, depending on your grill) and one side to low. Since each pizza moves from the hot side to the cool side, a good work flow is to start one pizza, flip it to the other side and add toppings, and then start another pizza on the now-empty side. I've found that smaller pizzas are much easier to work with and fit best on our standard charcoal kettle grill; as such, I've written this recipe to make 8 small 4-slice pizzas.
To prepare dough, roll each dough ball out into a 10-inch circle on a lightly floured sheet of parchment. Trim parchment into a neat square around dough and arrange on a tray so dough can be easily grabbed for grilling. Cover loosely with damp towel and set dough in a warm place to rise for 30 minutes.
When grill's ready, set peppers over the hottest part of the grill. Grill each side 1 - 2 minutes, turning until peppers are charred on all sides. Remove to a plate and allow peppers to cool. When cool enough to handle, cut into 1/4-inch thick round slices, discarding seeds.
Arrange brush and olive oil, sliced peppers and nectarines, and ricotta so that they can be easily accessed from the grill. A timer that indicates minutes and seconds is also great to have on hand.
Select one of the prepared dough rounds and lightly brush top with olive oil. Hold pizza dough backed with parchment in the palm of your hand and flip over onto the hot part of the grill. Do this quickly so the crust keeps its shape (but don't worry if it doesn't – the pizza will still be delicious). Peel parchment paper off the back gently, using a spatula to help separate them if you need to.
After 90 seconds, lift an edge of the crust and peek to see if it's nicely browned. If it's not ready, give it another 30 seconds and peek again. When ready, use a spatula to flip pizza and move to the cool side of the grill.
*I used this pizza dough recipe from the NY Times. I divided dough into 8 (4-ounce) dough balls. Feel free to use any pizza dough recipe you like – just make sure you have a total of 32 ounces of dough.