Jalapeño & Sunny Eggs Pizza

Written By Brad English

Eggs-perimentation – Numero Dos:

I love Eggs on a pizza.  They are a perfect topping being both a topping and possibly becoming part of the sauce of the pizza.  If you time it right, you can get the egg to cook to that perfect Sunny Side Up – runny deliciousness.  After the pizza comes out, you simply take a fork and knife, or a spoon and break the yolk and spread it around the pizza.  The egg is now playing two roles, both of which work perfectly on a pizza. But I’ve already told you this the last time I posted, and then Peter reiterated it in his recent blog about Pure Pizza in Charlotte.

So this is the second pizza in my latest little pizza experimentation here at Casa Ingles (as we affectionately call it)!  The fun thing about making pizza, as I’ve written before, is that there is a lot of opportunity for creativity.  Unlike when cooking other things, you get to try a number versions every time you make pizza.  They bake quickly and you are generally making at least 4 different pizzas during a meal.  It would get costly if you cooked up 4 large steaks every time you had that as a main dish, using seasonings and different cooking techniques.  I suppose you could cut a steak into smaller portions and do that, but that has it’s own set of downfalls.  My point (and I do have one) is that pizza is a naturally interactive food during planning, prep, and eating.

You can lay out a plan and easily find a new path to the perfect pizza that you are hoping to make. I often only plan out a couple of the pizzas I’m going to make and then let the others come out of something I see while I’m shopping, or something that may be in the house at the time.  It’s those found ingredients that sometimes take a pizza to the next level.  This pizza came out of the idea of using Jalapeños.  I am fascinated with the idea of pre-cooking them, which knocks out some of the heat and leaves you with a bold flavorful ingredient with enough spice to make them stand out, but not too much for those who can’t take a lot of heat.

 

Jalapeño & Sunny-Eggs Pizza de Casa Ingles

Ingredients:

Pizza Dough

-I used my favorite Central Milling Germania Flour, Signature Bruery Pizza Dough but you can use your own favorite dough

Peter’s Herb Oil

Partially baked thinly sliced potato

Sautéed Mushrooms, Zucchini, and Jalapeños

-I sautéed these to get them started cooking before going onto the pizza.  Season with a little salt and pepper and sauté until just cooked – allowing room for them to finish cooking on the pizza.

Bel Gioioso Creamy Gorgonzola Cheese (or other blue cheese)

2 Eggs

Chopped Scallions

Fresh Rosemary Needles

Grated Parmesan

 

The Build:

Spread the dough on a well floured peel.

Sprinkle a little of the Herb Oil on the dough.

Add the potatoes, zucchini and mushrooms.

Break off chunks of the creamy gorgonzola cheese.  Alternatively, you could use another soft cheese, like a brie mixed with a little blue cheese.  I didn’t use much cheese here.  First of all this cheese is very flavorful and I didn’t want it to take over.  Second, I wanted the sautéed vegetables and the egg to play a bigger role.

I wanted to make sure that I achieved runny sunny-side Up eggs on this pizza.  So, I decided to set this pizza in the oven and bake it for a couple of minutes and then add the egg.

 

The Bake:

Bake in your oven for approximately 2-3 minutes.

*Make sure you pre-heat the oven for at least an hour to get your pizza stone up to temperature.  I pre-heat at 550 degrees and then turn it to Convection Bake before loading my first pizza, which lowers the temp to 525 degrees.

Pull the pizza out and crack two fresh eggs over the top.

 

Add the sautéed jalapeños.

Place it back into the oven.  Bake until the eggs and crust and all the ingredients are just right.  This should be about 4-5 minutes.  For this pizza, base the doneness on the eggs.

The eggs came out perfect on this one.  You can see that my crust has some charring and darkness to the edges and the toppings got a little brown on the edges as well.  The egg is perfectly cooked!  The yolk is soft and ready to be spread across the pizza and become part of the overall sauce.

 

 

Carefully spread the yolk around trying not to move all the ingredients away from the center as you do.  You’ll find that you can move things back and forth once you break the yolk and start spreading it out so that you keep the ingredients balanced for each bite.

Finally, top the finished pizza with scallions and some grated Parmesan.

Enjoy!  And do send us some ideas of your own…

 

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