One of the best vegetarian pizza recipes that you can find is for a white egg pizza topped with pecorino cheese and scallions. Handmade artisan pizza at its finest.
This egg pizza comes with a tale, and that tale is about how my husband Alex and I met, fell in love, and eventually got married. After that, while we were on our honeymoon, we found ourselves falling in love all over again… with handmade pizza! Since then, the two of us have solemnly committed to teaching ourselves how to cook artisan pizza in our own kitchens. It took us a decade, but we finally accomplished our goal!
This egg pizza with pecorino cheese and scallions are very comparable to an egg pizza that we enjoyed in Rome while on our honeymoon. Back then, the egg was a complete surprise to us, but these days, you can find eggs just about anywhere in the United States. Here is a step-by-step guide to making a white egg pizza topped with Pecorino cheese and scallions, as well as a picture of the original egg pizza that inspired it all!
The egg pizza that started it all
Our enthusiasm for artisan pizza could be best described as borderline obsessive, given how much we talk about it. In 2007, Alex and I found ourselves in Rome, where we enjoyed our first “genuine” handmade pizza together. As we were on our honeymoon, our travel guide recommended that we eat at the restaurant that had the most delicious pizza in the area.
There was an egg perched on top, and the crust was paper-thin and crisp. The sauce had a pleasantly sour flavor. Egg pizza? We were skeptical at first, but it turned out to be an amazing experience. In point of fact, here’s a picture of us enjoying exactly the same egg pizza while on our honeymoon in Rome.
This experience sparked a profound interest in artisan pizza made in the Italian way, which eventually became an addiction. Even though we were not very interested in food at the time, on the flight home we made plans to build a pizza restaurant. Nevertheless, the first thing we had to do was figure out how to make it on our own.
It takes years to develop the ideal pizza (if we had known this when we started, I’m not sure we would have continued), but it’s worth it in the end. Yet, after a lot of trial and error, we finally worked out how to produce pizza crust, using both the stand mixer and the food processor.
How to make egg pizza
Let’s get back to PIZZA. The pizza that we tasted while we were in Rome served as the inspiration for this dish. Olive oil and cheese are used in place of the traditional tomato sauce topping on this dish. We had a pizza that was topped with baby asparagus, but as it is not asparagus season in our part of the world, we substituted scallion greens, sometimes known as the tops of green onions. They look great on top of the pizza and contribute a flavor that is just the correct amount of oniony and garlicky.
The Pecorino Romano cheese is essential to this dish; if you can’t locate it in your neighborhood grocery store, keep looking because the flavor is unlike that of any other cheese. (We were able to locate these at Trader Joe’s.) And the egg: exactly like our very first Roman pizza, it’s seductive, and it turns the egg pizza into a creamy, gooey mess.
How to store egg pizza
Leftover pizza can typically be kept in the refrigerator for up to a few days or even frozen for consumption at a later time. Due to the fact that this homemade white pizza has cracked eggs on top, it is recommended that it be consumed as soon as possible. That is, having just been removed from the oven.
We tried eating the egg pizza that was left over from the night before the next day, but it was not very tasty (the runny yolk does not reheat well at all). It is therefore in your best interest not to make any attempt to save this white pizza for a later time. Have some right away, and relish each and every taste of it!
Ingredients
- 1 ball Best Pizza Dough (or Food Processor Dough or Thin Crust Dough)
- 4 scallions (green onions)
- ¾ cup shredded mozzarella cheese
- ½ cup shredded Pecorino Romano cheese
- 2 eggs
- Olive oil
- Kosher salt
Instructions
- In order to prepare the dough, you should follow the recipe for the Best Pizza Dough. (The preparation time is approximately 15 minutes, and the resting time is 45 minutes.)
- Put a pizza stone in the oven and turn the temperature up to 475 degrees Fahrenheit. Alternatively preheat your pizza oven (the pizza oven that we use is shown here).
- Make sure the toppings are ready: Remove the green sections of the scallions and slice them into thin strips using a sharp knife. Warm up half a tablespoon of olive oil in a skillet on low heat. Add the scallions and cook for one minute, stirring constantly, until they are just beginning to get soft. Take the dish away from the heat.
- After the oven is ready, sprinkle cornmeal or semolina flour on a pizza peel and then transfer the pizza to the oven. (If you don’t have a pizza peel, you can use a baking sheet that doesn’t have a rim or the back of a baking sheet that does have a rim. But, the expense of purchasing a pizza peel is money well spent!) Form the dough into a circle by stretching it out; for details, see “How to Stretch Pizza Dough.” The dough should be transferred to the pizza peel in a careful manner.
- Put together the pizza as quickly as possible: The dough was brushed with olive oil and then kosher salt was sprinkled on top. The mozzarella cheese, followed by the Pecorino cheese, should be sprinkled over the top. Finished with sliced scallions. Gently crack two eggs on top of it, and then sprinkle some kosher salt over them.
- Bake the pizza: With the help of the pizza peel, transfer the pizza to the pizza stone, and bake it for about seven minutes, or until the egg white is set but the yolk is still runny.
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