Grilled Margherita Pizzas (Pizza of the Month, May 2022)

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These mini grilled margherita pizzas made with fresh mozzarella, basil, and a simple crushed tomato sauce on Naples dough are the perfect summer date night dinner.

What’s On A Margherita Pizza?

A traditional margherita pizza has four main ingredients:

1. Naples-style dough
2. San Marzano tomato sauce
3. Fresh mozzarella
4. Fresh basil

Like the story behind many other classic Italian dishes, old legends claim that the ingredients in a margherita pizza represent the three colors of the Italian flag: red, white, and green. Other stories claim the original margherita pizza was much simpler than what we see today, with a light base of crushed tomatoes instead of a tomato sauce. Whatever the case may be, we’ve eaten our fair share of margherita pizzas, and have never been disappointed!

Our version of the margherita pizza is traditional in some ways and unique in others. We made a Naples-style dough from our Mastering Pizza cookbook, sliced some fresh mozzarella, and picked a few leaves straight from our basil plant. But we strayed from tradition a bit when it came to the sauce and the cooking method.

Tomato Sauce

San Marzano tomatoes are a variety of plum tomato from the Campania Region. They’re supposedly the best canned tomatoes you can buy, and contribute to the delicious flavor of a classic margherita pizza.

However, it’s not always easy to find these at the grocery store! And we wanted to experiment with a simple sauce made mostly from canned crushed tomatoes. For our final recipe, we used organic canned crushed tomatoes with basil, lightly seasoned with some garlic, olive oil, and salt. Super simple, easy, and fresh-tasting, with the hint of basil in the canned tomatoes coming through just enough to complement the fresh basil on our pizza.

Cooking Method

Traditionally, margherita pizzas are cooked in a wood–fired dome oven. But with summer quickly approaching, we’ve been craving grilled pizza and thought these mini margherita pizzas were the perfect choice. A wood-fired oven tends to leave a crispy, smoky char on the crust, which can be replicated at home on the grill – or with a stovetop grill pan. With some guidance from our favorite pizza cookbook, we perfected the art of stovetop grilled pizza for this recipe.

How To Make Grilled Margherita Pizza

Here’s how to make these mini pizzas on a grill pan:

1. Preheat the pan over medium-high heat and spray or brush with oil
2. Stretch the pizza dough into mini crusts
3. Transfer the dough to the grill pan and cook until the bottom is lightly crisped, about 2 to 3 minutes
4. Lower the heat and transfer the crust to a cutting board or work surface, with the grilled side facing up
5. Top the pizza with sauce, mozzarella, and fresh basil leaves
6. Transfer the assembled pizza onto the grill pan, cover, and cook for about 5 minutes or until the bottom is crispy and toppings are warmed through
7. Transfer the cooked pizza to a cutting board and let it cool for about 2 minutes or so before cutting with a large chef’s knife

Repeat these steps for each pizza (remember to turn the heat back up when grilling the dough, then lower before adding the toppings) until all the mini pizzas are cooked! Note that you can follow the steps in this recipe on a traditional grill, too. This will let you grill as many mini pizzas as you want, all at the same time.

How many mini pizzas can I make?

Mini pizzas are super fun because you can make them as small as you want! Do you want to serve each person their own personal mini pizza? Or do you want a mini pizza for two? Maybe you’re imagining each person with two or three of their own mini pizzas.

It’s really up to you to decide how mini you want to make your margherita pizzas. We split one 270 gram dough ball into 2 mini pizzas, about 8 inches in diameter. But you could definitely make 4 even smaller pizzas out of the same amount of dough. We wouldn’t recommend going any smaller than that, but you can always make more dough if you want more pizza!

Keep in mind that if you’re working on a grill pan, you’ll likely only be able to cook one pizza at a time. You can work in batches and keep the mini pizzas warm in the oven until they’re ready to serve. Just place a large baking sheet on the middle rack of your oven, preheat to 170 degrees, and toss the cooked pizzas on it (before slicing!) to keep them warm. Then, once you’re ready to serve dinner, take all the pizzas out, slice, and serve.