Don’t have a hearth or a pizza oven but love the blistery crunch of flatbreads and pizzas? Time to fire up the grill! Use the recipe or blueprint technique below to achieve the perfect grilled flatbread.

I’ve written about grilled pizza a number of times over the years (see my very old Serious Eats article here or my relatively newer NYT article here), and for good reason: For a regular home cook, grilling is one of the easiest ways to get the kind of intense heat that produces a pizzeria-style crust—soft and airy inside, crisp and blistered outside, with plenty of leopard-spotted char.

This is what I’m talking about:

And through I’ve written about the pizza technique, I’ve never really gone further towards presenting this as a more generalized technique for cooking flatbread on the grill.

Bread is one of my favorite things to cook outdoors. It’s fast, it’s easy (at least compared to other methods for making flatbread and pizza), it works with a wide range of lean doughs (even store-bought pizza dough!), it’s extremely forgiving (misshapen flatbreads are a good look that show you made it by hand), and on top of that, for many people who are used to grilled meats and vegetables coming off the grill, bread and pizza is a completely novel experience.

It’s also infinitely adaptable. You can make versions of classic flatbreads like pizza, lahmacun, naan, pita, or tarte flambée. You can use the flatbread as a base for any toppings your wild mind comes up with. You can use it as a bread for tearing up and dipping into olive oil, labneh, hummus, or other spreads and dips. You can serve it alongside a gorgeous salad and some simple grilled meat cooked alongside the bread. You can grill them and stack them under a towel to steam and soften into pliable wraps for kebabs, grilled vegetables, shawarma-style meats, or whatever else you feel like stuffing into it.

You get the idea. Pizza is just one branch of the family tree.

The Precedent

I started cooking professionally part-time while I was in college, but my first full-time job after graduation was as a cook at Cambridge 1, a grilled pizza shop and bar on Church Street in Harvard Square, opened by the same folks who opened Miracle of Science (the bar where countless MIT startups have formed).

There, we cooked thin, irregular pizzas directly on a custom cast-iron grill. The grate itself could slide toward or away from a hardwood-charcoal fire, giving us direct control over how much heat the crust was getting. I’d roll a piece of dough into a thin oval, drape it onto the grate, slide it over the glowing embers, cook it for about 30 seconds until it blistered on top and charred underneath, flip it, add the toppings, and grill the second side. The entire process took only a few minutes, and after mastering it at the restaurant, it quickly became one of my backyard cookout staples.

Folks from Rhode Island may recognize the concept of grilled pizza. The specific technique we used at the restaurant was taught to us by a chef who worked for George Germon and Johanne Killeen at their restaurant Al Forno in Providence, where modern American grilled pizza was created in the early 1980s.

But of course, humans have been cooking flatbreads—topped or not—over, under, or beside a live fire for millennia. That makes the case for thinking of this technique as a generalized blueprint for flatbreads, rather than pizza-specific, even stronger. Join the Cookbook Club today and get additional written recipes following this grilled flatbread blueprint to test for yourself! 

The Science of Char

The underlying technique is essentially the same in every case: Take a piece of relaxed dough, expose it directly to the fierce heat of a grill, let it puff, blister, and char, flip it, then decide what you want to do with it.

So what makes it work so well?

Traditional hearths and pizza ovens fired by wood or coal regularly reach temperatures of 800°F (425°C) or higher. At those temperatures, a few things happen.

The first is oven spring. As soon as dough starts to heat up, pockets of carbon dioxide gas start to expand and water starts to convert to vapor. The result is a rapid puffing of the dough. This puffing all occurs within the earliest stages of baking (or grilled) when the dough is still moist and relaxed enough to expand. Once the crust gets set by heat, no more oven spring can occur.

Because of this, oven spring is highly dependent on the temperature at which the dough is cooked. Cooked slow enough, virtually no oven spring will occur as the dough starts to set and dry out before much gas expansion has occurred inside. On the other hand, pop dough into a blazing hot hearth or grill, and you immediately start to see it expanding and bubbling dramatically.

This oven spring is important to creating that light, airy texture inside the bread.

The second is a large built-in temperature gradient. What I mean is that with extreme heat, variations in cooking are amplified. So the tops of thin bubbles will get darkly charred while the rest of the crust gets crisp but stays lighter in color. Meanwhile, the interior is just barely set and extremely moist, having not had time to dry out.

The result is a thin, crackly, spottily-charred shell surrounding a moist, steamy, stretchy crumb. 

A backyard grill is one of the few common pieces of home equipment capable of approximating that kind of high-speed cooking, which makes it the ideal candidate for flatbreads as well.

And unlike a pizza baked to Neapolitan standards, grilled flatbread is remarkably forgiving. You don’t have to preserve a perfect cornicione around the rim. You don’t need a beautifully round skin. You don’t need an elegant launch off a peel.

All you have to do is roll the dough flat with a rolling pin, drape it over the grill, and flip it with a metal spatula or pizza peel. A few minutes later you’ll wind up with something beautifully puffed, charred, and crisp.

That’s what really makes this less a recipe than a blueprint. Once you understand a handful of basic ideas, you can take it anywhere you’d like. Both the blueprint for the best grilled flatbread and the recipe itself are included below. 

The Blueprint For The Best Grilled Flatbread

1. Start With Dough

The simplest dough to make is something like my standard Neapolitan-style pizza dough, although my NY-style pizza dough would also work. That said, virtually any relatively lean, not-too-sticky dough will work here. I’ve made naan dough with butter and milk that puffed and charred perfectly. I’ve made a quick bread-style dough using baking powder and yogurt that was perfectly pliable for wrapping around Turkish Adana kebabs.

For the simplest solution, just do what I did for the video: use store-bought pizza dough. It doesn’t crisp up quite the same way a homemade dough does, but it works perfectly well.

2. Get in Shape

The key to shaping dough in a way so it forms a great crust is to start with a very smooth dough ball. Honestly, watching the video above is the easiest way to see how I do this, but the basic idea is that you hold a 225g (1/2 pound) ball of dough by pinching just a little bit of it between the thumb and forefinger of one hand (think of it like forming a tiny outie bellybutton). Then with your other hand, pull the dough and stretch it over the top of itself and tuck it into the bellybutton. Give the dough a little rotation and repeat the process.

What you should end up with is a ball of dough that has a tight “skin” around it like a good ball of mozzarella. That skin should be gathered all into a little point at the base, which you can then smooth out by gently rolling the base of the ball around on an un-floured work surface.

3. Take a Rest

Every time you manipulate bread dough, you tighten its gluten network, which means that immediately after shaping, a ball of dough will be springy and elastic. If you try to roll it out, it will fight you, shrinking back toward its original shape almost as quickly as you stretch it.

Give the dough balls at least 2 to 3 hours at room temperature, covered so they don’t dry out, and the gluten will relax. A properly rested dough ball should look smooth, soft, and slightly spread out. More importantly, when you poke your finger gently into it, it should maintain that impression for quite a while.

You can rest dough in a specific pizza dough proofing container like I use if you make pizza often, or you can use small lightly oiled bowls or deli containers if not.

4. Forget a Cornicione

For most oven-baked pizzas, shaping the dough is partly about preserving bubbles around the rim so you get an airy cornicione. With a grilled flatbread, however, we’re not looking for a noticeable puffy rim around it (the cooking setup on the grill doesn’t allow for it anyway). This is good news because it means we don’t have to stretch our dough out by hand—a rolling pin will do the job just fine.

Moreover, you don’t need to worry about the shape. You can make a circle, an oval, a rounded triangle, an amoeba, or a blobfish. Whatever the shape, so long as it’s relatively thin and flat, the grill will take care of the rest.

5. Build a Two-Zone Fire

A two-zone fire is a grill in which one side is very hot and the other side is relatively cool. In practical terms, for a charcoal kettle grill(my grill of choice), that means you light a full chimney of coals and spread them under one side of the grill, leaving the other half empty. In a gas grill, it means turning half the burners on high and leaving the others off.

Now you have two tools in one: The hot side for cooking, creating the puff, char, and blisters. The cool side gives you control. By sliding the flatbread from the hot side to the cool side, you buy yourself a little extra time to top the pizza or let toppings heat up and cheese melt without the risk of incinerating the bottom.

That two-zone setup is the home-grill equivalent of the movable grate I cooked on at Cambridge 1. Learn more about setting up a charcoal grill in this video.

6. High Heat = Textural and Flavor Contrast

This is the key thing to remember with dough (or, in fact, virtually anything you cook): The faster it cooks, the greater the contrast between its exterior crust and interior crumb. At very high heat, the outside browns, chars, and crisps before much moisture can escape from the center. You get a thin, crackly shell with charred spots around a steamy, elastic crumb.

As the grill cools, the same dough will take longer to cook, allowing more moisture to escape and producing bread that’s progressively dryer and crisper over the course of a few bakes. This isn’t a problem. Both can be delicious.

But if you’re after that dramatic contrast, you’ll want to keep the grill very hot, which means adding some fresh coals to the top of the embers from time to time and allowing them to ignite before cooking the next flatbread.

7. Mise en Place Matters

As you’ve surmised, this whole thing happens very fast. Once the dough hits the hot grill, you have to start paying close attention to how its cooking and you have only minutes before it traverses from puffy and moist to dry and crackly.

Before I cook anything, I like to have my mise en place ready. That means having all of my toppings ready to go in separate containers with the right tools for spreading them on the pizza. It means having the dough, a rolling pin, some flour, and a surface to roll on ready and waiting. It means having my metal pizza peel (the best too for flipping and retrieving any type of flatbread) at the ready and serving platters on standby.

Once you start grilling, you don’t want to be searching in the fridge for the mozzarella.

Finally, if you want to take it one step further, you can pre-roll your dough balls in the kitchen before heading outdoors. Roll the dough balls out one at a time, dust generously with semolina, then stack them with sheets of parchment paper in between. It’s an easy way to make sure the cookout is all smooth sailing.

7. Draping the Dough: The Trickiest Bit

The only slightly tricky part in this whole process is draping the dough over the grill grates. Once the dough goes down on the grates, it’s very hard to adjust it until the bottom sets, which means that the initial drape will define the shape of the finished flatbread.

Luckily, shape doesn’t matter much. The only thing that does matter is ensuring that the dough is not folded over itself, and that its edges are not slipping through the grates closer to the coals.

If you have a round kettle grill, there’s another trick I’ve used for years: drape the dough initially over the cooler portion of the grill, then rotate the grate itself so the flatbread moves over the coals. You can rotate the grill as necessary to move the bread around as you bake and top it.

8. Grill and Flip

As soon as the dough goes down, it’s important to pay close attention and watch the bubbles forming on the top. Start peeking at the bottom of the dough after about twenty to thirty seconds, lifting them up with the edge of a pizza peel or large spatula and rotating the grilling dough as necessary to get relatively even browning and charring on the underside.

Once it’s nicely charred, you can flip the dough over and char the second side.

You’ll notice that the two sides have noticeably different texture, with the side we cooked first being relatively smooth but the second side being puffy and bubbly.

At Cambridge 1, that first, flatter side became the top of the pizza while the puffier side was underneath. This never sat right with me, so the one meaningful change I’ve personally made to the Al Forno/Cambridge 1 process is to give the cooked flatbread an additional flip before topping it so that the bubblier side faces upward.

9. Top as Desired, but be Careful!

Toppings are the biggest conceptual difference between cooking a topped flatbread on a grill and baking a pizza in an oven. A pizza oven surrounds the pizza with heat. Hot air and powerful radiation from above help cook toppings, evaporate moisture from tomato sauce, and melt cheese.

With a grill, on the other hand, the vast majority of the heat is coming from below. This leads to a few important rules:

Rule 1: Cook your toppings first. Toppings added to a grilled flatbread will heat through and herbs and tender greens may wilt, but they will not meaningfully cook any further than when they were applied. This means that if something needs cooking—say, mushrooms or sausage—it should be cooked before it goes onto the flatbread. 

Rule 2: Reverse your topping order. On a normal pizza, the sauce typically goes underneath with the cheese on top. For a pizza on the grill, since we’re heating mostly from below, you reverse that order, spreading the cheese (and not too much!) across the base of the flatbread before applying other toppings. 

10. Heat it all Together

After your flatbread is topped as desired, you can place it back on the cool side of the grill and cover the whole thing with a lid while you start rolling out your next dough ball. By the time the dough is rolled, the toppings should be piping hot, and you’re ready to cut and serve the first one (I like doing a rectangular party-cut for these) and get started on the second.

And that’s it. The perfect food for a backyard cookout or dinner for the family.

Whether you turn the bread into pizza or use it for dipping or wrapping, once you understand what the grill is doing—the rapid oven spring, the char, the crisp exterior and moist interior, and the fact that almost all of the heat is coming from below—you can stop thinking of this as a recipe for grilled flatbread and start thinking of it as a technique for making dinner.

A true wood-fired hearth may be the best tool for flatbreads and pizzas, but if all you really want is great flatbread—through any means necessary—there’s a very good chance the best tool for the job is already sitting in your backyard.

Recipe: Grilled Flatbread Blueprint

Every recipe I publish here is personally tested, tasted, and approved.

What I love about this recipe:

Once you master the technique, you open up a world of possibilities.

The heat of the grill delivers true hearth-style texture and flavor contrast in the bread.

The dough doesn’t need to be perfectly round, and a rolling pin works just fine.

It works with store-bought dough.

It scales well for a crowd.

Yield: 2 flatbreadsActive Time: 25 minutesTotal Time: About 3 hours, including resting timeSpecial Equipment: Rolling pin; charcoal or gas grill; metal pizza peel or wide metal spatulaNotes: Blistered, smoky, and crisp outside with a soft, chewy center, this grilled flatbread is an endlessly adaptable base for toppings, dips, and wraps.

Ingredients

1 pound (900g) store-bought or homemade pizza dough

All-purpose flour, bread flour, or semolina, for dusting

Extra-virgin olive oil, for brushing (optional)

Toppings and dips, as desired.

Method

Divide the dough into four approximately 225 g (8-ounce) portions. Working with one portion at a time, pinch a small bit of dough between the thumb and forefinger of one hand to form a little “bellybutton.” With your other hand, stretch the outside of the dough over itself and tuck it into that point. Rotate the dough slightly and repeat, continuing until the outside has formed a smooth, taut skin and all of the folds meet at one point underneath. Set the ball seam-side down on an unfloured work surface and gently roll it under your palm to smooth the bottom. Repeat with the remaining dough.

Place the dough balls in a proofing container, lightly oiled individual deli containers, or lightly oiled small bowls. Cover and let stand at room temperature for at least 2 to 3 hours. The dough is ready when it has softened and spread slightly and an indentation made with your fingertip is slow to spring back.

If using a charcoal grill: Light one full chimney of charcoal. When all the charcoal is lit and covered with gray ash, pour out and arrange the coals on one side of the charcoal grate. Set the cooking grate in place, cover the grill and allow to preheat for 5 minutes.

If using a gas grill: Set half the burners to medium–high, cover, and preheat for 10 minutes. Clean and oil the grilling grate.

Dust a work surface and one dough ball lightly with flour. Using a rolling pin, roll the dough into a thin oval, circle, rectangle, or whatever irregular shape it naturally wants to take, roughly 12 inches across at its longest dimension. Brush the upper surface lightly with olive oil if desired.

Pick up the dough from one end and drape it oiled-side downover the hot side of the grill in one smooth motion, taking care that it does not fold over itself. Cook, watching closely, until the dough begins to puff and the underside is browned and charred in spots, about 30 seconds to 1 minute. Use the edge of a metal pizza peel or wide spatula to lift and check the underside as it cooks. Rotate or reposition the bread as necessary for relatively even browning. On a round kettle grill, you can also rotate the entire grill grate to move the flatbread over hotter or cooler areas.

Brush the upper surface lightly with olive oil if desired, then flip the flatbread. Cook until the second side is puffed, blistered, and charred in spots, another 30 seconds to 1 minute. For flatbread you intend to eat plain, use for dipping, or turn into a wrap, continue cooking until it reaches your desired texture, shifting it toward the cooler side of the grill if it is browning too quickly. For flatbread you intend to top, cook the second side completely, transfer the bread to a tray or work surface, then top and return it to the indirect side of the grill and cover to heat through for a minute.

Serve immediately or, for plain flatbreads, stack them under a clean kitchen towel to trap steam and keep them soft and pliable.

For more variations on this dish, join our Cookbook Club! 🔗