Did you know you can bake bread on your outdoor grill? We had quite the heat wave a couple of weeks ago, and I didn’t want to heat up the oven. I really wanted to bake bread, though, so I figured I’d give it a go on the grill. I used sourdough, but I don’t see why this wouldn’t work equally well with other bread doughs.

Looks like plenty of folks before me have done this, so I read up on it a bit. Plenty of admonitions to use a grill-safe baking stone (I don’t have one) or a covered, grill-safe cast iron pot (I don’t have one of those, either.) So I rigged it up with an upturned pie plate on a cookie sheet to give the bottom crust a bit more insulation and turned the middle burner down a bit. In spite of that, the bottom crust was pretty crusty, but I was still quite pleased with how the loaf came out. One more week of not having to buy bread!

Here’s how I did it:

1.) For the final rise, I greased a disposable (recyclable) aluminum pie plate. I formed the dough into a ball, set it in the plate, and set the whole shebang in a 2-gallon zip-top freezer bag. Then I used a straw to blow air in before sealing the top. That gave plenty of room to make sure the top of the risen dough wouldn’t stick to the plastic.

2.) When the bread had risen enough, I preheated the grill on high. That’s when I set the cookie sheet and an upside-down aluminum pie plate on the grate (that one didn’t get dirty, so I can reuse it later.)

3.) Next, spraying water on the dough:

scoring the loaf (not one of my better attempts at scoring, but it was adequate):

and onto the grill. Middle burner gets turned down to low.

4.) It took a lot less time to cook than it does in the oven. Usually, in a standard loaf pan in the oven, I bake it for 20 minutes. In the grill it only took 10, so do keep an eye on it more than you usually might. Since grills are a lot less standardized for temperature than ovens are, I expect everyone (and possibly every loaf) might need a different time.