Pizza. What a pleasure, right? Discussing something so fundamentally good seems like the right way to start the week. Bonus points are awarded for also being incredibly practical, if you’re faced with the (sometimes Sisyphean) task of getting dinner on the table night after night.
My mom makes pizza almost daily now, as she’s suddenly been thrust back into the business of feeding a slew of small hungry mouths nightly, something she hasn’t regularly done since the four of us were very young. (How’s that for reverse time travel?) And pizza—as she has discovered—is a big-batch workhouse of a meal.
Her recipe—which I’ll write about soon—yields a very specific sort of pizza with a cracker-thin crust. It’s light and crunchy and painted with a layer of sweet homemade tomato sauce. The dough is really more of a medium for vegetables and cheese; it’s crispier and far more cracker-like than even a Neapolitan or traditional thin-crust pizza.
She makes a double or triple batch of dough at once and lets it sit in the fridge until she’s ready to bake, grabbing off a hunk of dough and pressing it onto a buttered baking sheet.
That is most certainly my favorite kind of pizza to eat on a regular basis, but it’s harder to perfect, skill-wise. Easier is a more classic crust—softer and chewier and doughier. There’s a bit more margin for error when you’re not aiming for that ultra-thin method.
And pizza dough is—in general—extremely forgiving. It’s pliable and easy to work with and even imperfect pizza is pretty excellent, usually.
Funnily enough, though she’s perfected it, we didn’t eat much pizza growing up. We had calzones (a close cousin to pizza) a lot in our lunchboxes. Occasionally I’d eat a slice or two of extremely mediocre, floppy Domino’s pizza at a birthday party or soccer team dinner, the shredded mozzarella congealing unpleasantly on the edges.
In college, there was late night pizza, eaten only when pretty inebriated. (Sorry, mom.) We’d stumble into the student center where a few sad, flabby slices sat leftover from dinner, baking under a bright heat lamp. The wan, doughy crust was certainly baked from frozen and never approached anything like a crisp golden brown.
The red sauce coating the top boasted very little in the way of tomato flavor. It was covered by a waxy, plastic-like layer of what was ostensibly some form of real cheese, and although it wasn’t anything to write home about, it was hot and salty and savory and served its purpose of satisfying the boisterous crowds of students making our way home from a night of partying, soaking up however many cups of foamy cheap beer were sitting in our stomachs.
Later still, I discovered better forms of pizza when I moved to New York, sampling the puffy crusts of Neapolitan pies with their blistered undersides at Motorino on First Avenue and the much-lauded thin crust creations at Roberta’s in Bushwick, where you’d wait an hour for a table, sipping tiki cocktails out of Mason jars and examining the menu to decide between options like the famous Bee Sting (soppressata, mozzarella, chili, honey, and basil) or the Lil Stinker (pecorino, pepperoncini, garlic, and red onion) or the Four Emperors (sesame, arrabbiata sauce, asiago, ricotta, and mozzarella).
Despite the very good pizza I’ve eaten over the years (white pies covered in fresh zucchini blossoms at a crowded outdoor cafe in Rome; summer pizzas topped with local peaches and prosciutto or corn and bacon on the North Fork of Long Island; a beautifully charred creation at Delfina in San Francisco featuring a ball of creamy burrata that burst open under the weight of a knife to ooze over the crust; nearly all of Gjelina’s vegetable-forward pizza menu including one piled high with mixed mushroom, one draped with wild nettles and duck prosciutto, and one with grilled radicchio and oily confit tomatoes), I still like to make it at home.
Part of the reason is the tactile pleasure of making any sort of dough, and the pride of eating something you’ve created—a pride that never lessens or abates with time or practice or repetition.
And part of the reason is that selfishly you can make a pizza exactly the way you like it, especially if that exact combination doesn’t exist at any restaurant near you.
(For example: I love salad-topped pizza—a phenomenon that should really exist the world over, and doesn’t. There’s a cozy little Italian spot in my college town that makes a white pie called the “insalata di pizza”: after the pizza is cooked with mozzarella and ricotta, the chefs make a fresh salad in a big metal bowl, tossing together greens and grilled chicken in a light balsamic vinaigrette. Then they pile the entire salad on top of the hot pizza, letting the heat of the cheese wilt the greens. It’s perfect.)
But I can do this at home so easily when I make my own. I make a salad I like. I make a pizza I like. Pile one on the other. Voila.
Or I can use pizza as a canvas for whatever is in season.
At the moment, that is zucchini—and for the next month or so, it will continue to be, as the garden explodes with it.
Zucchini is an excellent pizza topping, and I take inspiration from a version I loved years ago in New York. There was a tiny bakery called Grandaisy across the street from my first apartment, a place I shared with my sister. We used to run over to get breads or a piece of cake at night, often standing awkwardly in the doorway as there was barely room for more than one customer inside at a time. They made a very good flourless chocolate cake and an excellent chickpea and arugula and shaved carrot sandwich. But their pizzas were the best: large rectangles of very thin crust in three varieties. One shingled with crispy circles of potato, one spread with tomato sauce and Parmesan, and one piled with a tangle of caramelized onions and shavings of zucchini.
The onions are key here. They get golden and crunchy as the pizza bakes and they add a slight sweetness to the salt and savoriness of the dough and the cheese.
If you don’t want to make your own dough, ask a local pizzeria if you can buy a ball of theirs—it’ll be better than anything you can get in a store.
For this pizza, I use my slightly tweaked version of Roberta’s pizza dough recipe, which does require both bread flour and 00 flour, but has great flavor thanks to a 24-hour rest and fermentation period, and is also super easy to work with. You can use any dough recipe, of course, but this one is really nice. You really should measure the flour by weight if you have a scale—it really varies how people weigh cups of flour (I use the King Arthur method where 1 cup equals 120 grams), and here it does matter.
Zucchini and Caramelized Onion Pizza
Makes one large or two small pizzas
For the dough
153g 00 flour
153g bread flour
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 teaspoon instant or active dry yeast
1 teaspoon olive oil
200g lukewarm water
For the topping
4 tablespoons olive oil, divided
4 large yellow onions, thinly sliced
3 tablespoons water
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 cup fresh ricotta cheese
3/4 cup fresh mozzarella cheese, grated
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese, divided
2 medium zucchini, sliced into coins
fresh basil, to garnish
Make the dough: Whisk together the flours and salt. In a small bowl, whisk together the yeast, olive oil, and water. Add the wet ingredients to dry and mix (using your hands is easiest) until the dough comes together in a ball. Let the dough sit for 15 minutes.
Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured or greased work surface and knead for about 5 minutes. Place into a lightly oiled bowl, cover loosely with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 8 hours—I like to do a full 24 hours.
Grab a hunk of dough when you’re ready to bake—about half of the dough is good for one large pizza. Let it sit at room temperature while you make the onions.
Make the caramelized onions: Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed skillet or Dutch oven until shimmering. Add the onions and cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, for about 45 minutes or until a deep, dark golden brown. Remove from the heat and stir in the water, scraping up the browned bits as you do. Add the salt and stir well. Set the onions aside (you don’t have to use all of them for the pizza—use as much as you like!).
Preheat the oven as high as you feel comfortable: at least 450 degrees F is ideal.
Stir the minced garlic into the ricotta.
Press and stretch your dough out into a large round, as thin as you like. I prefer a thinner crust pizza, but it’s up to you. You can either do this on a pizza peel if you have one, and transfer it onto a hot baking steel or pizza stone, or you can stretch it directly onto an oiled or buttered baking sheet.
I use a baking sheet—just leave the edges un-oiled or un-buttered so you can “stick” the dough to the outer edges to keep it from shrinking back. If it does shrink back on you, just let it rest for 10 minutes at room temperature and try again. This should help the dough relax.
Spread the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil over the surface of the dough, then spread the garlicky ricotta on top in a thin layer. Add the mozzarella and half the Parmesan, then the zucchini and onions, then the rest of the Parmesan.
Bake for about 10 to 15 minutes, or until golden brown with bubbling cheese. Remove from the oven and sprinkle the fresh basil on top, then let cool slightly before cutting and serving.