Spicy White Pizza with Bacon, Shrimp & Asparagus

By tulawdog

Ingredients

• 1 ball pizza dough (see note above)
• coarse cornmeal for the pizza pan
• 1/2 cup whole-milk ricotta
• 1/4 cup Breakstone’s sour cream
• 1/4 lb. bacon, diced
• 1/2 pound large shrimp, peeled and deveined
• 6-7 spears asparagus, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
• 1 chili pepper, seeded, deveined, and sliced into thin strips
• shredded mozzarella cheese
• Parmesan cheese
• freshly cracked black pepper

Preparation

Step 1

For this recipe, I’m assuming that you either bought a ball of pizza dough somewhere—or made your own. If you’ve refrigerated your dough, take it out and let it come up to room temperature before handling.

Preheat your oven to 500 degrees.

Make the white sauce for the pizza

Put the ricotta and the Breakstone’s sour cream in a small bowl.

Grind on a little fresh black pepper. (I don’t add any salt here because the shredded cheese is usually plenty salty.)

Mix until uniform. Set aside.

Fry the bacon

Dice the bacon up. Put it in a nonstick pan over medium-high heat.

Stir occasionally, cooking until the bacon is crisp.

Remove the bacon from the pan with a slotted spoon. Set it aside in a bowl (line it with a paper towel, if you like, to catch any leftover grease).

Pre-cook the shrimp

Discard most of the bacon fat from the frying pan. (Save it in the fridge and use it to fry potatoes!)

Toss the shrimp into the pan. Season with a little freshly cracked black pepper. Cook over medium-high heat, stirring frequently.

This is important. You just want to get a little color on the shrimp at this point—but not cook them all the way through.

When they’ve just turned pink on both sides, yank them out of the pan and put them in a bowl. (See how they’re a little blueish and translucent in places? That’s what you want. It means they’re still raw inside.) They’ll finish cooking in the oven.

Roll out the dough

Sprinkle a little coarse cornmeal on a large pizza pan (round or rectangular…up to you!

Set your ball of dough on a lightly floured board.

Stretch it out (or roll it…sacrilege, I know…but also pretty darn effective) so it covers your whole pizza pan.

Assemble the pizza!

Grab your cheese out of the fridge. It’s time to assemble the pizza.

So, by now, your counter should look about like this. Pan covered in dough. Ricotta/sour cream white sauce. Fried bacon and shrimp. Sliced asparagus and chili pepper. Grated Parmesan and shredded mozzarella.

Spread a thin layer of white sauce on the dough. (Depending on how large your pizza is and how thin you rolled the crust, you may or may not use all of the sauce.)

Sprinkle with half the chopped bacon.

Sprinkle with a little shredded mozzarella.

Arrange the shrimp so they’re spread out.

Add some slivers of pepper.

And the asparagus spears.

Sprinkle with the rest of the bacon, a little more mozzarella, and some grated Parmesan. Topping a pizza like this (cheese, toppings, more cheese), helps the toppings stick to the pizza better when you bite into a slice.

Bake the pizza!

Pop the pizza into your preheated 500-degree oven.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, until the cheese is brown and bubbly and the crust is crisp.

Yank the pan out of the oven. Slice immediately and serve.

Enjoy!