Best ‘Homemade’ Pizza Ever!

For dinner one evening, we once again experimented with a ‘semi-homemade’ pizza…

This time, we used a full size pizza crust…shown above…that we’d purchased from Fresh Market in Farragut Tennessee. 

Don’t you just love product labeling?  Note that this pizza crust was made with “real” ingredients!  Does someone make pizza crusts from ‘unreal’ ingredients?

I lightly basted the crust with olive oil.  Laurie asked that I use pesto instead of tomato sauce or pizza sauce for the base.  I readily complied…using Costco’s Kirkland brand Basil Pesto. (”Happy wife, happy life!”)  Then I added crushed red peppers, Italian seasoning, black pepper, and the dried garlic…the latter ingredient which is so evident in the photo above.

As a test, I applied some pieces of Benton’s prosciutto to about a third of the pizza.  It’s slightly visible in upper center.  Then I covered the pizza with slices of Hormel pre-cut pepperoni.

For the next step, I added a very generous amount of pre-packaged 4-cheese pizza mix cheese… It was My Essentials Food Lion brand...with mozzarella, smoked provolone, parmesan and romano cheese.  Then I sprinkled a little deli asiago cheese over the top of the pizza cheese blend for just a little more flavor.  Laurie also asked me to sprinkle a little more crushed red pepper on the top.

The instructions on the pizza crust said to bake the pizza at 425 degrees for between 8 and 12 minutes.  We like our pizza crust crispy so we left it in the oven for a total of 15 minutes…resulting in the beautiful pizza above!  The crust was perfect and the pizza was terrific!  It popped with flavor and texture…the best ever ‘semi-homemade’ pizza to date…and incidentally, it was also the best pizza that we've had in East Tennessee... The portion of the pizza where the prosciutto had been applied had a little richer flavor but it was an unnecessary ingredient in combination with the pepperoni.  The pesto base was a great choice… 

Note to self!  The next time I use pesto as the base for a pizza crust don’t baste the crust with olive oil, as there is plenty of oil in the pesto itself.  We ended up with some oil dripping down on the bottom of the oven.  

Future experiments with pizzas will include a pizza with tomato sauce, high end cheese, roasted garlic, prosciutto on its own...also a pizza with Italian sausage, deli grade pepperoni and perhaps even a vegetable or two…

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave