Putting thrill in your grill

Hey there, you with the barbecue. Are you suffering from the Seven-Week Itch?

It happens to the best of us. Memorial Day arrives, you can’t wait to grill hot dogs and hamburgers, chicken and ribs. By Independence Day, you’re staving off boredom by grilling steaks, shrimp, swordfish, onions, zucchini and pineapple.

By mid-July, you’ve hit the wall. There are seven more weeks until Labor Day, it’s too hot to cook indoors, and you’ve exhausted all your favorite menus. No mere marinade can save you from the barbecue doldrums.

Do not despair.

With a dollop of daring, this can become the most exciting and delicious part of the outdoor season. You can grill pizzas or oysters, tofu or watermelon – even ice cream. Best of all, you can cook each of these dishes within minutes, without working up a sweat or neglecting your guests.

For starters, you could do as the Deen family does in Savannah, Ga., and grill some oysters. Food TV star Paula Deen, who owns and runs Lady and Sons restaurant with her boys Bobby and Jamie, likes to serve them with an elegant lemon-dill sauce.

But Jamie says he prefers the way his Uncle Bubba makes them across town at Bubba’s Oyster House.

“You can do la-di-da, but this is just the opposite,” says Jaime, whose new TV show with brother Bob, “Road Trip,” premiered on Food Network in early July. “These are Lowcountry fire-roasted oysters that you drink with beer, not champagne.”

Unlike his sister Paula’s, Bubba’s recipe for grilled oysters has never been written down, his nephew says.

“You just take off the top of the shell and put ‘em directly over the hottest part of the grill and pour some garlic butter on ‘em and a little Parmesan cheese,” Jamie Dean advises.

“Some of the garlic butter will drip onto the fire, and the flames will leap up around the oyster and crisp up the cheese. As soon as that happens – about 2 to 3 minutes – you just take it off the grill and take a fork to the cheese-crusted oyster and a piece of bread to mop up all those buttery juices. Hoo-boy, it’s good!

“I’m not usually an oyster fan, but I could eat these all day long.”

If you’re looking for low-fat rather than Lowcountry, you could follow the lead of Corinne Trang, the Vietnamese-American cookbook author whose 10-minute recipe for grilled tofu with ginger-soy sauce is enough to make even the most devoted carnivore turn vegetarian.

“Firm tofu, when grilled, is turned into something completely new,” the New-York based Trang writes in her latest book, “The Asian Grill” (Chronicle, 2006, $22.95).

“Grilling makes the tofu cakes wonderfully crisp on the outside and tender on the inside.”

For the main course, nothing could be finer than the famous grilled pizza recipe invented at Al Forno Restaurant in Providence, R.I. Owners Johanne Killeen and George Germon struggled for weeks to perfect the 8-minute technique in 1980 in the mistaken belief pizzas were cooked this way in Italy.

By the time they discovered that Italians use wood-burning ovens, their signature dish had attracted a huge following that endures to this day.

Al Forno’s executive chef Brian Kingsford warns that you can’t grill a great pizza on a gas grill, which can’t heat higher than 550 F. He advises hardwood or charcoal fired to its maximum heat of 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit.

“The secret of success is low moisture – if the crust doesn’t crisp quickly enough, the pizza will be soggy,” he says. The Al Forno chef uses hardwood briquets that have a moisture content of only 3 percent, and Italian fontina cheese, which has a lower moisture content than mozzarella.

For the salad, take your cue from Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park restaurant in Manhattan. The Swiss chef first tasted grilled watermelon at a tapas bar in Barcelona, Spain. He liked it so much that he added it to the menu at his previous restaurant, Campton Place in San Francisco, where it proved so popular that he brought the recipe with him to New York.

For an elegant presentation, Humm uses a cookie cutter to cut the grilled watermelon into rounds and tops it with cylinders of red, yellow and green tomato that he extracts using an apple corer. The structure sits on a pool of vibrant green dressing made in the blender from olive oil, fresh basil and balsamic vinegar.

To avoid mushiness, “I cook the watermelon only on one side for less than two minutes — just long enough to give it grill marks and a smoky taste,” Humm says.

Rick Browne, who hosts the PBS TV series Barbecue America, also found inspiration for exotic grilling while dining out. “I saw a baked Alaska once at a restaurant in Portland, and I thought ‘How do they do that?”’ the Vancouver, Wash., resident recalls.

“And then I thought, ‘Wait a minute! I could do that on the grill!’”

Browne’s original recipe, published in his 2003 book “Grilling America” (Harper Collins, $25.95), proved too messy, as it called for slicing the ice cream and cutting through crisp meringue with a serrated knife. His current version calls unabashedly for using processed foods, for the simple reason that “They’re a perfect fit!”

“No slicing, no dicing, no leaking, no crumbling,” he says. “I just put one ingredient on top of the other, and five minutes later I take it off the grill and everyone says ‘Wow!’”

Before he turned barbecue king, Rick Browne was an Associated Press photographer. For that sentimental reason, he agreed to share his politically incorrect yet surefire secret for making this new, improved version of his signature dessert.

“If you use the giant Sara Lee poundcake and Klondike ice cream bars, it’s a perfect fit,” he confides. “You just lay three of the bars on top of the cake and there’s no gaps or leaks – plus you get an automatic and even layer of chocolate sauce.”

(Browne particularly recommends the Peppermint Patty flavor bars, or the Rainbow, which he says “looks especially nice when you cut into it because there’s a layer each of chocolate, vanilla and strawberry ice cream.”)

Rick’s Barbecued Ice Cream (aka ‘Grilled Alaska’)

Adapted from Rick Browne’s www.barbecueamerica.com

1 large pound cake, frozen

3 square ice cream bars (no sticks), hard

12 to 16 egg whites

1 teaspoon cream of tartar

1 cup granulated sugar

Raspberry and apricot jams

Chocolate sprinkles

1 wooden plank, 12-by-12-by-1-inch thick, soaked in hot water

Heavy-duty aluminum foil to wrap plank

8-ounce jar chocolate fudge sauce or caramel sauce or other topping of your choice

Electric knife (for best results)

Fresh mint leaves for garnish

Get a good hot fire (500 degrees Fahrenheit plus) going in a kettle grill or smoker. If you use charcoal in a kettle grill mound it in two piles on either side of the cooker, leaving the middle of the grill open. If using a gas grill, turn on all burners to high.

Whip the egg whites, cream of tartar, and sugar into a stiff meringue so that when you pull beaters away sharp points stand up in the meringue. At the last minute add a generous amount of chocolate sprinkles and quickly fold into the egg whites. Put in refrigerator.

Working quickly, wrap the wet plank in the foil. Cut frozen pound cake in half horizontally, and lay one half on the foil. Spread raspberry jam on top of the pound cake half. Place the ice cream bars on the jam-covered pound cake so they exactly cover the surface. Place the other piece of pound cake on top of the ice cream, and cover with apricot jam. Completely cover the cake on all sides with meringue, being sure to bring the meringue all the way down to touch the foil all around cake. (If you leave any gaps the ice cream may melt and spoil the dessert.) Place the plank on the center of the grill in the cooker.

Check after 2 minutes and as soon as you see the peaks of meringue brown remove the dessert from the cooker. This will take only a few minutes with a very hot fire. Slide the cake off the plank and onto a chilled serving platter. Cut vertical slices through meringue, cake and ice cream with an electric knife (much preferred way) or, if you don’t have one, use a very sharp serrated knife that you dip into hot water between slices. Slide slices onto plates onto which you have spooned a generous pool of chocolate or caramel sauce, or both. Garnish sauce with fresh mint leaves, shake more sprinkles over meringue and serve.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings

Approximate nutrition per serving: Unable to calculate.

Grilled Oysters with Lemon Dill Sauce

Recipe courtesy Paula Deen Show: Paula’s Home Cooking. Episode: Oyster Show

1 or 2 dozen tightly closed fresh oysters in shell

Lemon Dill Sauce (recipe follows)

Prepare your grill grate. When coals are white, spread coals out for even heat distribution. Place the oysters directly on the grate with the deeper shell down. As soon as the shells pop open (about 5 to 8 minutes) the oysters are ready to eat. Serve immediately, with the sauce.

Yield: Varies

Approximate nutrition per oyster with 1 ounce Lemon Dill Sauce: 130 calories, 9 grams fat (2 grams saturated, 64 percent fat calories), 7 grams protein, 4 grams carbohydrate, 45 milligrams cholesterol, less than 1 gram dietary fiber, 130 milligrams sodium.

Lemon Dill Sauce

1 cup mayonnaise

1/4 cup buttermilk

2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill leaves

1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley leaves

1 tablespoon grated lemon zest

2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

1 small garlic clove, minced

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and stir well. Refrigerate until chilled; the sauce will thicken as it chills.

Yield: About 1 1/2 cups

Approximate nutrition per 1-ounce serving: 99 calories, 8 grams fat (1.6 grams saturated, 76 percent fat calories), 4 grams protein, 2 grams carbohydrate, 25 milligrams cholesterol, no dietary fiber, 93 milligrams sodium.

Grilled Pizza with Fresh Summer Herbs

This recipe will make enough dough for four 12-inch pizzas. Each pizza will serve 4 as an appetizer or 1 as a main course. You can use any combination of fresh herbs for this exceptionally delicious pizza. Al Forno executive chef Brian Kingsford’s latest version uses a “Simon and Garfunkel” combination of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.

6 ounces Pizza Dough (recipe follows)

1/4 cup virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon minced fresh garlic

1/2 cup mixed chopped fresh herbs of your choice (3 or 4 different kinds)

1/2 cup loosely packed shredded Italian fontina cheese

2 tablespoons freshly grated Pecorino Romano

1 scallion, sliced lengthwise into paper-thin strips

6 tablespoons Pizza Sauce (recipe follows)

Prepare a hot charcoal fire, setting the grill rack 3 to 4 inches above the coals.

On a large, oiled, inverted baking sheet, spread and flatten the pizza dough with your hands into a 10- to 12-inch freeform circle, 1/8-inch thick. Do not make a lip. You may end up with a rectangle; the shape is unimportant, but do take care to maintain an even thickness.

When the fire is very hot, use your fingertips to lift the dough gently by the two corners closest to you, and drape it onto the grill. Catch the loose edge on the grill first and guide the remaining edge into place over the fire. Within a minute the dough will puff slightly, the underside will stiffen, and grill marks will appear.

Using tongs, immediately flip the crust over, onto the coolest part of the grill. Quickly brush the grilled surface lightly with olive oil. Scatter the herbs, garlic and cheeses over the dough, and spoon dollops of the tomato sauce over the cheese. DO NOT cover the entire surface of the pizza with sauce, or it will become soggy. Finally, drizzle the pizza with 1 to 2 tablespoons of olive oil.

Slide the pizza back toward the hot coals, but not directly over them. Using tongs, rotate the pizza frequently, so that different sections receive high heat; check the underside often to see that it is not burning. The pizza is done when the top is bubbly and the cheese melted, about 6 to 8 minutes. Remove from fire, sprinkle with the scallion and serve at once.

Yield: 1 to 2 servings as main course, 3 or 4 as an appetizer

Approximate nutrition per serving, based on 4: 281 calories, 19 grams fat (4.7 grams saturated, 61 percent fat calories), 7 grams protein, 21 grams carbohydrate, 15 milligrams cholesterol, 1 gram dietary fiber, 434 milligrams sodium.

Pizza Dough

One envelope (2 1/2 teaspoons) active dry yeast

1 cup warm water

1 teaspoon sugar

2 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt

1/4 cup johnnycake meal or fine-ground white cornmeal

3 tablespoons whole-wheat flour

1 tablespoon virgin olive oil

2 1/2 to 3 1/2 cups unbleached white flour

Dissolve the yeast in the warm water with the sugar.

After 5 minutes, stir in the salt, johnnycake meal, whole-wheat flour and oil.

Gradually add the white flour, stirring with a wooden spoon until a stiff dough has formed. Place the dough on a floured board, and knead it for several minutes, adding only enough additional flour to keep the dough from sticking.

When the dough is smooth and shiny, transfer it to a bowl that has been brushed with olive oil. To prevent a skin from forming, brush the top of the dough with additional olive oil, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and let rise in a warm place, away from drafts, until double in bulk, 90 minutes to 2 hours.

Punch down the dough and knead once more. Let the dough rise again for about 40 minutes. Punch down the dough. If it is sticky, knead in a bit more flour.

Pizza Sauce

3 tablespoons virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon minced fresh garlic

12 Italian plum tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped

1 teaspoon kosher salt

Heat the olive oil in a heavy sauté pan. Add the garlic, and sauté until golden. Add the tomatoes and cook over moderate heat, stirring frequently, for about 10 minutes, or until the sauce begins to thicken. Add the salt. Set aside until ready to use. The sauce may be cooled to room temperature, covered, and refrigerated for up to 4 days, or frozen for up to 2 weeks.

Grilled Tofu with Ginger-Soy Dressing

Adapted from “The Asian Grill” by Corinne Chang, Chronicle, 2006, $22.95

3 pounds firm tofu, each cake cut crosswise into six 1/4 -inch-thick slices

1/4 cup soy sauce

2 teaspoons dark sesame oil

2 tablespoons vegetable oil, plus more for brushing

1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons finely grated fresh ginger

2 scallions, trimmed and cut into paper-thin diagonal slices (both white and green parts)

Red pepper flakes for garnish

Toasted sesame seeds for garnish

Line a plate with a double layer of paper towels, then place the tofu slices in a single layer on top. Place another double layer of paper towels on top and refrigerate for 2 hours.

In a small bowl, whisk together the soy sauce, the sesame oil and 2 tablespoons vegetable oil. Add the ginger and scallions and stir. Set this dressing aside.

Brush each tofu slice with vegetable oil on both sides.

Prepare a hot fire in a charcoal grill, or preheat a gas grill to 500 degrees Fahrenheit (high). Grill the tofu slices, turning them once, until heated through and golden, about 2 minutes per side. Place the tofu slices on a serving plate. Spoon the dressing over and around each piece of tofu. Sprinkle lightly with red pepper flakes and toasted sesame seeds and serve.

Yield: 6 to 8 servings.

Approximate nutrition per serving: 224 calories, 17 grams fat (2 grams saturated, 65 percent fat calories), 17 grams protein, 3.6 grams carbohydrate, no cholesterol, 1 gram dietary fiber, 467 milligrams sodium.