- Any pizza that's made with quality ingredients
and a lot of thought is delicious.
We've made grilled pizza everywhere.
In some places, it's caught on,
and in others, it's unknown.
With this technique, it's absorbing the smells
and the aromas of the fire;
it's a unique method of doing it and a unique taste.
As simple as these things are,
sometimes simplicity is complexity.
The grilled pizza -- it's a love story, actually.
My husband and I met in a restaurant kitchen,
and we fell in love and wanted to do something together
and decided food was where we wanted to go.
We'd both lived in Italy;
George lived in Rome, and I lived in Florence,
and then we started cooking for each other,
the things that we learned.
We thought we could still do all our freelance work
and have a restaurant and do everything.
Within a week, we just gave everything else up.
George had a conversation with a man --
he wasn't very much of a cook -- and he told George
that he had had a trip to Italy and had grilled pizza.
And when George told me that story
I said, "We both lived there, that just does not exist.
I think he's using the wrong term."
He probably saw fire,
but it was an oven, not a grill.
George got it in his mind that grilling pizza
could possibly work, and we already had
a wood-burning grill in our kitchen.
So I made some dough.
He played around with it, and within 15 minutes,
we had something truly delicious and put it on the menu.
There was trial, but no error, it seemed.
Much to my surprise, the dough didn't go
between the rungs of the grill;
it just stayed there, firmed up within two minutes.
It just worked perfectly, pretty much the first time.
And we thought, "OK, well this is delicious,
and it's a pizza, people love pizza,
we'll put it on the menu," but we didn't realize
it was kind of a revolution.
For George and I, the benchmark of pizza
is pizza margarita.
If we've gone someplace like Naples
where pizza is very, very different,
it's the pizza margarita that I always start with,
and then we might get a little bit more adventurous.
But that's the benchmark.
The unique way that we do the grilled pizza
allows the dough to absorb more of the flavor of the fire.
With a wood-burning oven, the dough,
there's a very little curl where
the smoke will touch the pizza itself.
With a real charcoal fire,
portions of the fire are hotter than others.
So depending on how the fire
is basically touching the dough,
they'll be some places of the crust that are crispy
and others that are chewy.
The pizza dough is a very simple bread dough.
It's flour, water, yeast, and salt,
and it's a slow fermentation process.
The dough is actually stored in olive oil,
so it does take on some of the oil into the dough.
The dough gets spread out very thin.
The bottom gets char marks on it almost right away,
and within a minute, it puffs up
and is ready to get turned over.
So once it's turned over, the grilled side
is brushed with olive oil and then cheese first,
'cause we want the olive oil to melt the cheese
and then the tomato.
That was also something that George
just did from the get-go,
and we've been doing it every since.
We do a pizza with fried calamari on top,
and we got the idea when we were teaching in Sicily.
George and I would go to a pizzeria for dinner
a couple days before the classes started.
And one night, the next table was a family
with a lot of kids, and we noticed that the kids
were served a pizza with French fries on top.
We thought that was so crazy
and kind of fabulous, so when we got back
to Rhode Island, that morphed into calamari,
but I call them "pizza bambina,"
because it's the kids pizza.
The calamari is kind of an adult version.
With the calamari pizza, it's kind of a spicy tomato,
the calamari gets put on top, and off it goes.
We change the menu a lot.
Often we will have an asparagus pizza in the spring.
We did a recipe for asparagus pesto.
Pesto just basically means crushed.
So a pesto could be anything,
and this one happens to be made with roasted asparagus
in a very high-heat oven.
We tried this pesto on a pizza recently,
and it's just delicious, and it's another one of those
springtime ingredients
that works really well with the pizza.
After I graduated from RISD and went to Italy,
it was the food that excited me at the time.
The food is just everything that you just wanna have
at your table.
So it's Italian envy, I suppose.
I don't think there's another culture
that enjoys life as much as the Italians.
I believe that people just love pizza, I mean,
I love pizza.
It doesn't have to be grilled pizza.
I go to a local restaurant that has
Neapolitan pizza with the wood-burning oven,
and it's absolutely delicious.
And I think I'm like a lot of people
where you can get to a certain point
and just say, "I've gotta have a pizza."
And I think that's part of why the grilled pizza
became such a rage.
Flipped it on the grill, and it worked, I mean I --
(Sirens)
- It's coming back.
(Fire truck noises)
- Oh, and more.