This summer, put your salad on your pizza

Is serving a salad alongside a pizza obligatory? It sometimes feels that way — the logic (I use that word loosely) is that when serving something decadent like pizza, one must serve an austere serving of vegetables on the side. For nutrition’s sake.  

I reject all sides of this argument — I don’t think of pizza as necessarily decadent (though it can be, just as salad can be). But I do love to pair salad and pizza together, not because I feel obligated, but because they enhance each other to create an even better eating experience. Salad offers juicy, crunchy, vibrant acidity that is a delicious counterpart to a rich and cheesy slice. This is why at any pizza party you will find me with lots of salad on my plate. You will even see the salad piled right on top of my pizza — hot slice, crisp salad, can’t lose.

In this way I improvise what is a real genre of pizza: the salad pizza. All great pizzerias offer this, most often in the form of the arugula pie, where a handful of dressed greens is arranged on a pizza right after it comes out of the oven. But arugula is the beginning, not end, of salad pizza possibilities. I love topping a pizza with a salad of paper-thin zucchini and mint. In Marc Vetri’s Mastering Pizza, pies are topped with salads such as apples with radicchio and gorgonzola, and shaved cauliflower with kale, pistachios, and raisins. And in King Arthur’s own cookbook, The Book of Pizza, we top pizzas with all manner of salads, from kale salads to tomato salads to crunchy iceberg salads. That variety and versatility means you can customize your salad pizza to your season, and what better time to take advantage of those possibilities than summer?  

Photography by Andrew Thomas Lee; food styling by Jen Ophir; prop styling by Paige Hicks

Any pizza can be a salad pizza, but one pizza, Pizza Bianca, is particularly suited to it. This traditional Roman style is a bit like a cross between focaccia and ciabatta: It is usually baked unadorned, in roughly 15" x 5" rectangles, then topped with fresh ingredients when it’s out of the oven. One classic topping is arugula and prosciutto, which in The Book of Pizza we garnish with strips of parm and lemon zest. 

Another Roman style, the crispy pizza tonda (found in The Book of Pizza), is also great for salad pizza. Thin and crunchy like an enormous cracker, it can be piled high with dressed greens and chicories such as watercress, frisee, or radicchio. If there’s a throughline among pizza styles that lend themselves to salad, it’s that the crusts have a lightness to them. Pizza tonda is sturdy but thin, crisp, a little ethereal. Likewise, pizza bianca, while thicker than pizza tonda, is full of air and eats (almost) like cotton candy. Neapolitan pies, which are often seen with fresh greens on top, are puffy and airy in the crust and thin in the middle. (It also helps that Neapolitans are often eaten with a knife and fork, perfect for eating salad.) Meanwhile, this inventive BLT Pizza uses our Recipe of the Year Flaky Puff Crust Pizza dough as its base; true to its name, it's light and puffy, making the perfect counterpoint to the handfuls of crisp lettuce and summer-ripe tomatoes baked on top. 

Photography and food styling by Liz Neily

So if you want to make salad pizza, that’s your first guideline: Go light or thin with the crust. (Thick Detroit-style pies are an incongruous pairing to fresh salads on top, not the least because they make the slices unruly to eat.) Beyond that there are only a few rules. One is the golden rule of toppings, which I’ve written about before: Toppings must be prepped. In the case of salads, everything must be washed, of course, but also very well dried, otherwise vinaigrettes will not cling to them. Vegetables and cheeses should be cut or torn into bite-size pieces. And your salad should be well seasoned — it has pizza to compete with!  

But the strictest rule when it comes to salad pizzas is maybe the easiest one to follow: You have to eat salad pizzas immediately, before the salad starts to wilt. Most pizza is great the next day cold, but salad pizzas are fleeting. You are implored — obligated, even — to enjoy them in the moment. Just like summer itself.

Cover photo by Andrew Thomas Lee, food styling by Jen Ophir, prop styling by Paige Hicks.

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