You know those crazy people who don’t like sauce on their pizza (cough-my husband’s sister-cough)? Well this one’s for you!
Remember the other week when Morgan and I went to a neat gourmet store/cafe in Charlottesville called Feast? Well we also bought a little jar of basil pesto.
I have a great memory of going out late for food one night with a friend in college – for some reason we thought pesto pizza washed down with giant milkshakes at midnight was a great idea. We were wrong (dead wrong), but that doesn’t mean pesto pizza isn’t delicious!
1 ball of dough
1 jar of basil pesto or make your own (see recipe links below)
1 tomato
1 cup of freshly grated mozarella
a little bit of oil and a bit of flour
We bought a delicious and inexpensive bag of pizza dough at Chandler’s Bakery in Charlottesville.
If you have a pizza stone, preheat the oven with the stone in there to 525F. Flour a baking sheet and roll out the dough – preferably on a baking sheet that will make it easy to transfer the pizza to the stone (that’s always the hardest part!).
Drizzle a small bit of oil on the dough and then spread your basil pesto over it. It doesn’t take much pesto, maybe 1/4 cup for a medium size pizza. If you’d like to make your own, I recommend 101 Cookbooks’ recipe; Simply Recipes also has one but I haven’t tried it.
Slice the tomato and then cut the slices in half (I hate it when you bite into a piece of tomato but can’t bite through it all the way… let’s just go bite-sized!). Spread the slices over the pizza. Grate your mozzarella and sprinkle gingerly over the tomatoes.
Pull out the oven rack as far as you can, and get another person to help you carefully transfer the pizza to the stone. Bake for 10-12 minutes, or until the edges are golden brown.