Pizza can be vegetarian.
But if you really want that fatty beautiful unctuousness, you sometimes have to turn carnivore
on it.
Making a perfect meat pizza, it's a balance of flavors.
There's lots of different types of meats you can put on there.
There's a couple of rules that you want to approach the meat with.
First of all, what works great for pizza is really thinly sliced, cured meats.
So things like pancetta, which is the smoky, sometimes herby, rolled stomach of a pork,
so it's a pork belly, basically bacon.
We have sopracetta, which is studded with chili's, a little bit of cracked pepper so
it's a little bit spicy.
It's what we think about when we think of pepperoni.
Then, of course, a little prosciutto, which is salty.
It's really, really fatty and it really just makes the whole thing sing.
But you don't have to have cured meats.
You can look to cooked meats, too.
The whole idea is that you have seven minutes in the oven to cook through whatever you need
to cook.
So putting raw sausage on your pizza is not really an option.
You need to cook through the sausage and so it just kind of rewarms in the oven.
Same thing goes for chicken and including seafood.
Most of the time shrimp can carry over and mussels, as well as other shellfish.
But for the most part, any meat that's raw form you're going to need to cook before you
throw it in the oven.
Today we're going to make a little bit of a meat lover's pizza.
You kind of just take the different forms of meat and you kind of just let them work
for you.
A little bit of olive oil on my pizza.
I always do this, just to keep the crust a little bit more crispy and just a little bit
more exciting as well, all right?
Some great kosher salt right over the top, awesome.
With this, you know, I'm going to go with a little bit of my hot soppressatas, so this
is spicy.
I don't even want to see the bottom of this pizza.
I just want to coat every inch with this beautiful, it's kind of fatty, spicy cured meat.
A nice layer of that.
If I was going to hit it with the pancetta or a smoky bacon it might be a little too
fatty, so just a little bit of saltiness from the prosciutto.
And with this I just kind of tear it and just kind of let it fall wherever it does naturally,
just in waves.
If I put the prosciutto down flat, sometimes it has a tendency just to bake right into
the soppressata, and by doing this it gives it a little bit more character.
It kind of comes out at whoever's eating it.
Makes you want to dive in a little bit more.
Some beautiful caramelized onions just dotted around, awesome.
And if the chili wasn't enough for you, because it wasn't for me, just a little bit of chili
flake right over the top, crushed through my fingers right over there and then how about
a little fresh oregano as well.
That looks beautiful.
Now just a little bit of cheese to offset the fattiness of the meat.
You can really get close to overwhelming your pie by just piling on a lot of meat, so just
be careful.
That looks awesome.
And this one's going to get just a touch of cheese before it hits the oven.
Another touch of salt, little bit of something to tie the whole thing together.
Look how gorgeous that looks.
A sling of olive oil, and this is going on your pizza stone at home, for about seven
minutes at 500 degrees.
My beautiful meat pizza has been going for about seven to eight minutes.
I'm going to give it a check real quick.
Yes, grab the parchment.
Oh my, gosh look at that, incredible.
I'm going to hold the parchment down, let the pie just slide.
Now with this bad boy, the way to finish it up is some really, really good dark grassy
olive oil.
Just kind of paint it around the outside, awesome.
This looks beautiful.
A little bit of smoked Maldon salt.
It kind of emulates being outside in a brick oven, which is a really nice flavor to have.
Then some good Parmesan for our salt, so a little creamy.
On this pizza I held back with the tomato sauce, I didn't add it, but that's because
I really wanted the meat to be really pronounced.
I want it to sing off the pizza and if you're a carnivore like me, it doesn't get much better
than that.