Difficulty: Intermediate
If you’re anything like me you love pizza. We eat pizza once a week in our house. It’s our go to Friday night dinner. Ordering pizza can get expensive especially since we eat it every week, so we usually make our own pizzas at home and order every once in awhile. We order pizza so infrequently, that the last time I ordered pizza, which was six months ago, it made quite an impression on our kids. They were so excited and talked about it for several days. It’s the little things.
For the most part we prefer our homemade pizza to the chain pizza places. We figure why spend the money to eat something that we prefer to make ourselves. So, just about every Friday night we are making some type of pizza.
Sometimes we use store bought crust and other times we make the crust from scratch. Then there’s the garlic bread pizza, French bread pizza, tortilla pizza and naan pizza. For our kids we pick one of those crust types and then we make a sauce and cheese for two of the kids and a pepperoni and cheese without sauce for two of the kids.
The kids’ pizzas aren’t super exciting, but they like them and then, my husband Mike and I can create our own fancy pizza. That’s how this caramelized onion pizza was born. We wanted something different than a standard pizza, so Mike suggested caramelized onions and it snowballed from there with each of us suggesting ingredients based on what the other had suggested. We settled on the ingredients and made the pizza. After the first bite we were sold. This would always be our go to fancy pizza.
Caramelized Onion Pizza
4-5 Baseball Sized Onions, sliced
1 Thin Crust Pizza Shell (homemade or store bought)
½ Log Unflavored Goat Cheese
1 Apple, sliced thin (try Pink Lady, Honey crisp, Crimson Crisp, something sweet, crisp and slightly tart)
2 Hand fulls Baby Arugula
A few Splashes of Marsala Wine (optional)
1-2 TBSP Olive Oil
Preheat oven to 400°F. Slice onions and sauté in olive oil over medium high heat.
You will need to watch the onions and stir occasionally to avoid burning.
Cook onions for about 20 minutes until they are medium to dark brown in color, but not burned. If using marsala wine add a few splashes to pan once onions are caramelized and scrape up brown bits on pan, then remove from heat.
Take onions and spread over crust in place of sauce. Create an even layer and leave about a half inch border of crust. Take goat cheese straight from refrigerator and use a fork to crumble goat cheese evenly over onions.
Once oven is up to temperature place pizza directly on rack or onto a pizza stone. Bake for seven minutes. When the timer beeps, open the oven sprinkle baby arugula over pizza and put back into the oven and bake another one to two minutes or until arugula is wilted.
Remove pizza and top with apple slices.
Cut pizza into eight slices and serve. Delicious paired with a glass of wine or a beer.
Make this pizza for your next pizza party and wow your friends with your sophistication. The flavor and texture combinations are sure to impress!