Barbequed Peach Pizza!
Usually, my favorite thing to do with fresh summer peaches is to just slice them up onto my morning bowl of O’s and granola. But occasionally, I want something fancier, something to share with the whole family. Then, peach pie is a great way to go, but that heats up the whole kitchen. So then I saw this recipe. Brilliant! I couldn’t resist; we’ve been outside grilling food a lot anyway, why not grill dessert, too?
Now, I’m giving the recipe as I found it (torn out of a long-forgotten magazine). Next time I make it, though, I might spread the ricotta directly on the crust, before putting on the peaches. Someone try that and let me know how it goes.
4 large ripe peaches
juice of 1 lemon
1 pound of pizza dough
1 16-oz container ricotta cheese
1/4 cup plus 2 tbsp supgar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tbsp melted butter
1/2 c pumpkin seeds or pistachios
Preheat a gas grill to high; adjust to low after 15 minutes.
Peel the peaches, cut each into 16 slices, and drizzle with lemon juice. Set aside.
Combine the ricotta with 1/4 c sugar, set aside. Now combine the cinnamon and remaining 2 tbsp sugar and set that aside.
Lightly flour the back of a large baking sheet or pizza peel. Roll out the pizza dough to 1/4″ thick. Place the dough on the baking sheet, brush it with half the butter, and slide off the baking sheet directly onto the grill. Cook until the underside of the dough starts to brown, about 5 minutes (don’t worry if it bubbles up a little). Use tongs to slide the dough back onto your baking sheet, then flip the ungrilled side onto the grate. Brush the cooked side of the dough with the remaining butter. Arrange the peaches on top, and sprinkle with sugar & cinnamon and pumpkin seeds. Cover the grill and cook for 8-12 minutes, o runtil the underside of the crust browns. Slide off the grill and serve warm with the sweetened ricotta.
This looks AWESOME!! We got lots of peaches from my uncle’s bounty peach tree in Maryland last weekend (oh, good idea, I’ve got to blog about this). They were so ripe that we had to peel, cut and freeze them. I guess I can always make cobbler with the frozen peaches…
I took on your challenge/idea to put the ricotta on the dough. (We’re big fans of grilling pizza in general, and ended up with a ton of peaches from a pick your own expedition.)
I put kind of a lot of ricotta on, and it really melts and spreads out, so you’d want to either put less ricotta on or try to create some sort of edge to keep it all in (which doesn’t really work in the flipping/bbq pizza method). But it was reallllly yummy, though a little messy. It’s probably more “elegant” to leave the ricotta on the side, or hey, a little of both. (Oh and we skips the seed/nuts, since we didn’t have either…i think walnuts would be a good experiment, too!)
We also tried a version with marscapone (sp?) cheese, same method. I flavored that with some sugar and spice and vanilla, then added a tiny bit of milk so it was softer and easier to spread onto the pizza. That melted really quick – next time, I would have flipped, then waited and added the marscapone really close to taking it off the grill, since it almost melted away.
We loved the flavor of that, too, almost more than the ricotta, but we couldn’t really just pick one.
This is a bit different then the typical dessert pizza, which usually has a sweet cookie crust, but I really liked it.
But the ricotta also inspired us to maybe try dessert calzones with the rest of these peaches!! Just an idea.
Thanks for the blog – found you on my random googling for grilled peach pizza!