The big news around the Columbia food scene a little while ago is that the Neopolitan-style pizza place in Cottontown closed down after encountering social media struggles from one of the owners very early on. I never went there because the issues happened so quickly and afterwards I felt called to not patronize it. One of their signature pizzas that people who did go talked about was their blueberry and pancetta pizza, a combination that intrigued me.
After the pizza place closed, I conveniently had some freshly picked blueberries that I needed to use, plus a package of bacon that definitely needed to be used before it went bad.
My mind put the two together and the next time I had a few hours before dinner I made pizza dough (use this dough recipe from How Sweet Eats, or it's in her book Seriously Delish). While it was proofing I made red sauce, baked the bacon, and made sure the blueberries were de-stemmed.
Before I go any further, let's discuss tools. Pizza doesn't always taste great when it's made at home because few us of have the tools necessary to make a pizza like we'd get in a restaurant. Sure, we don't all have ovens that go up to 900 degrees, or brick ovens, or a cool long handled peel to put the pizzas in the oven. But we can take some steps to ensure a pretty good homemade pizza. The first thing is a good, large pizza stone. It ensures that the crust cooks evenly on the bottom and can handle the heat that you're going to need to apply to this pizza. The second thing you need is an oven you trust to crank up to 500 degrees.
Once you've got the necessary tools, it's time to begin the journey of preparing everything into one delicious sphere of pizza!
Blueberry and Bacon Pizza
Ingredients
Crust
- 1 ⅛ cups warm water
- 1 package active dry yeast
- 1 tbsp honey
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 3 cups all purpose flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tbsp cornmeal
Sauce
- 1 28 oz. can whole peeled tomatoes (San Marzano if you feel like it)
- 1 tsp salt
- ¼ cup olive oil
- 1 tsp ground black pepper
- 1 tsp dried basil
Toppings
- 8 ounces mozzarella cheese sliced
- ⅓ cup fresh blueberries
- 5-6 slices cooked bacon
- ⅓ cup Parmesan cheese finely grated
Instructions
- Use instructions from How Sweet Eats to make pizza dough.
- About twenty minutes before the dough is ready, put the bacon on a baking rack over a broiler pan. Place in a cold oven and set the oven to 425 F, and a timer for 25 minutes. Remove from oven when done and turn the oven heat up to 500.
- Put the sauce ingredients in a medium saucepan and cook over medium heat for 10-15 minutes. Cover with a lid if its bubbling too much.
- Once the pizza dough is ready, spread the tablespoon of cornmeal across the pizza stone (or maybe less depending on your pizza stone size). Roll out the dough into a circle that goes as far to the edges of the pizza stone as possible.
- Use a large spoon to spread sauce over the pizza. You will NOT use all of the sauce you made on this one pizza.
- Use scissors to cut the bacon into small slices. Spread the bacon, blueberries, mozzarella across the crust surface evenly and to your liking.
- Top with grated Parmesan and put the pizza and stone in the oven. Set a timer for 20-25 minutes.
It might seem weird to put blueberries on a pizza but if you think about it, sweet and savory are combinations that we encounter in plenty of other places and find them perfectly acceptable. For instance, dipping french fries in a Frosty from Wendy's, chocolate covered pretzels, and maple bacon doughnuts. Now that you've had your mind set right, go pick some blueberries and get to baking so you can have the most patriotic dishes coming forth from you oven that you possibly can.
If you're local to Columbia or Lexington, SC, consider keeping up with Berry Hill Farm and going to pick your own berries from their family farm.
You probably have a lot of blueberries too, so you're going to need the recipe for dark chocolate blueberry clusters as well.