Individual Ham and Egg Pizzas...

For our Friday Night Pizza this week, we strayed pretty far from a traditional pizza (surprise!) to make these intriguing Individual Ham and Egg Pizzas.

While I highly, highly encourage you to make your own dough for pizza, especially using our favorite whole-wheat pizza dough, don't be shy if you would just rather not. Stop by your market to get some or even your local pizza place - if you ask, they will usually sell you a chunk of their dough for pretty cheap.

The original recipe for this pizza has you roll out the entire piece of dough into a square and then cut it into four squares. However, to keep with the round theme of the egg we were going to add, we just quartered the dough and quickly stretched each portion into rounds as the homemade dough easily succumbs to our hands and takes no time to work with.

The pita-shaped pieces of dough (well, I guess you could even use pita bread if you were really short on time!) are then baked until crispy and golden. If you want to add a shiny coat, feel free to rub the rounds with olive oil before baking. You are not just pre-baking as we've done before during this step - leave the crusts in the oven until they are pretty much fully baked. The crusts are topped with a thin slice of ham and a mound of sharp white cheddar. As the cheese was melting, we had a skillet on the burner getting toasty to fry the eggs we were going to slide on top. You can take these as far as you want, but for us, we cooked them just long enough to set the white, yet leave the yolk as soft as possible.

As soon as the eggs were done and placed on top, I grabbed my plate and quickly took my seat to enjoy this. The first thing I had to do was pierce that golden sac to let that river of exotic love flow all over the top, covering the pizza with its playful richness. I didn't even have to ask what Jeff thought of this... his constant sounds of subtle "MMmms...." told me he felt just as I did. If you can, use your sharpest cheddar to lay down a base for the best bang in each bite possible.

Maybe it doesn't read like much in the recipe and it could be that I was just really hungry, but the uncomplicated nature of the ingredients combined into an excitingly simple dish that held my attention from start to finish. Usually we try and get a few snaps of the finished dish before we sit down to eat, but we were too anxious to wait to dig into these pizzas. So, by the time we had gotten back to the one we were going to take a picture of, the cheese had already started to firm back up... boo!

Recipes
Individual Ham and Egg Pizzas