carrot pizza. this is another one of those recipes that y’all should be mad at me for not sharing sooner. it’s delicious. and i’ve known about it since 2003. do you accept my apology for not sharing sooner?
quick detour: while we’re talking about things i should share with you, stat, let me just say: baking soda. it’s magical. i know i’m hardly the first person on the planet/internet to extol the magical cleaning powers of baking soda but twice in the past week i have used it to clean some seriously gnarly, burned on yuck.
we have a wood burning fireplace insert with a glass door and the door had basically become opaque from soot and i don’t even know what, some kind of black yuck. baking soda + water = magic paste! the yuck came off instantly. i was expecting a lot of scrubbing and letting paste sit on the stain (aka drip on the floor since the door is vertical) and what actually happened is that after 10 minutes, you could hardly even see the glass anymore because it’s so clear.
yuck round two is the inside of the oven. this one, i will say, is still a work in progress. years of greasy, burned on yuck is not leaving without a bit more of a fight, but it is leaving. (please calibrate your judging to account for the fact that we have not owned this oven since it was brand new and shiny clean. so while i don’t clean the inside of the oven often, this is not all my mess.)
ok, “quick”, maybe not so much, but i’ve been super impressed and just wanted to give my new friend baking soda his due.
carrot pizza! which, incidentally, contains no baking soda… mostly just a lot of carrots, sautéed until they are like no carrots you’ve ever had before. plus some garlic and mozzarella. are you in? (you should be, it’s super yummy.)
also, just a quick confession from a sometimes lazy very efficient food photographer: i said above that the pizza has “a lot of carrots”. but then maybe you looked at the photos and thought it wasn’t really such a lot of carrots for something named “carrot pizza”.
don’t worry, i was a little rusty on my carrot pizza making skills and in the name of efficiency and sunlight sometimes being a little scarce, i photographed a pizza that has half the carrots the recipe calls for below. so, follow the recipe and you will have twice as many sautéed-into-deliciousness carrots on your carrot pizza.
ok, i think i now have roughly at least as many words that are on topic (carrot pizza) as i do words that are off topic (but seriously, baking soda. magic.) soooo, i think we’re done here.
ps – fun update (in keeping with this post’s theme, “apropos of nothing”): i have a store! i collected all of the items i’ve recommended/linked to over time and put them all in one convenient place – that “shop” link in the menu bar! now you, too, can have life-changing magnetic measuring spoons (no, seriously) without having to hunt around and guess which recipe post i mentioned them in.
carrot pizza
Save to BigOven Ingredients
- pizza dough (this one or your favorite recipe/ball of dough from the store)
- ¼ cup (2 fl. oz. / 60 ml) olive oil
- 6 large cloves of garlic, minced
- 16 oz. (454 g.) carrots, peeled and sliced into 1/8” (0.3 cm) coins
- 4 oz. (1 cup / 113 g.) shredded part-skim mozzarella
Instructions
- prepare pizza dough. if you’re using the recipe linked above, it has to rise for 9+ hours. if you’re using something else, have it at room temperature and ready to go.
- in a large, heavy bottomed skillet, heat the olive oil over medium-low heat. have a small bowl and fine mesh strainer ready. when the oil is hot, add the garlic and stir constantly until the garlic is juuuust beginning to change color (to a light golden brown). set the strainer over the bowl and pour the oil and garlic through the strainer. reserve the garlic for later and pour the oil back into the same skillet.
- let the oil heat back up for a second and then add the carrots. they should start to quietly sizzle within a few minutes. if they don’t, turn the heat up a little bit, just until they quietly sizzle. stirring occasionally, cook the carrots until they are caramelized, about 45 minutes.
- while the carrots are cooking, preheat the oven to its highest temperature, usually 500° F or 550° F. if you have a pizza stone, set it in the oven now to heat up gradually to avoid cracking it by placing it in a hot oven later.
- on a piece of parchment paper, press or roll the pizza dough out. once the oven is preheated, prebake the dough on the parchment paper for 4 minutes before you put any toppings on it.
- pull the dough out of the oven (an upside down baking sheet is helpful to move the dough around or to use in place of a pizza stone) and give the dough a gentle shake to make sure it’s not stuck to the parchment paper.
- once the carrots are done caramelizing and the crust is prebaked, it’s time to assemble the pizza! spread the carrots and garlicky carrot oil out evenly across the pizza crust. grab that garlic you set aside earlier and dot that around the pizza too. cover the whole thing with a shower of mozzarella cheese.
- transfer the dough directly onto the pizza stone (without the parchment this time – the dough should no longer be sticky). bake for 7 – 8 minutes, until the cheese is bubbly and light golden brown. remove from the oven (baking sheet transfer for the win, again!) and let it cool for 1 minute before cutting it and enjoying.
Notes
adapted from the recipe of one of my dear friends.
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