Use plum tomatoes on a crisp crust

Making pizza margherita in the heat of summer demands optimum conditions: ripe, deep red, plum tomatoes; fresh mozzarella cheese; newly picked basil.

More conditions? You have to be committed to making a thin, crisp pizza crust, not a flabby dense one that will swallow up the tomatoes and cheese. To some, this means converting your outdoor grill to a pizza oven, expertly flinging a paper-thin crust onto the grill and then (the really hard part) flipping it.

As one who has spent too many summer evenings scraping failed dough experiments off of my Weber, I prefer to face my indoor oven's fiery blast, even in the dog days of summer.