Sweet Pistachio and White Chocolate Pizza

Pistachio and mascarpone cream tops this dessert pizza from Italian home pizza makers Cristina Bruno and Giuliano Bronzi of the food blog Vuoi Assaggiare. Cooked in a blue iron pan (an Italian specialty tray similar to a cast iron pan), this pizza gets crispy on the outside while staying cinnamon-roll soft on the inside.

This pizza starts with poolish, a mixture of flour, water, and fresh yeast that ferments for about a day before it’s added to the rest of the dough. This may sound like a daunting first step, but it only requires a little mixing and a lot of time.

And when you give your dough a 14-hour pre-ferment, along with two rises — first in a bulk ferment, then as a dough ball in the pan – you’ll get deliciously big air bubbles in return. After cooking, a layer of oil in the cast iron pan imparts an almost-fried crunch.

In their dough recipe, Cristina and Giuliano use diastatic malt (barley that’s been germinated, dried and finely ground), which helps feed yeast and makes your dough sweeter and softer, along with soy lecithin, an emulsifier made from soybean oil which produces a softer crumb. Look for these powdered additives at health food stores or specialty baking shops, like King Arthur Baking. Can’t find these ingredients? Leave them out. You’ll still end up with a great finished product.

Once the dough’s golden brown, this dessert pizza needs to cool down a bit before getting its toppings. Pistachio cream mixed with mascarpone gets piped onto a base that’s still slightly warm. If you’ve never worked with pistachio cream, it’s a green nut butter usually sweetened with honey and sugar, and available in supermarkets or specialty Italian grocers. The pizza is then sprinkled with white chocolate chips, which Cristina and Guiliano love for added sweetness, along with chopped pistachios for texture and a dusting of powdered sugar for decoration.

It all comes together for, as Cristina and Giuliano say, “Peak taste in just one bite!”

Note: The pistachio-mascarpone cream topping can be made up to 2 days in advance; just be sure to take it out of the fridge 20 minutes before using so it can come up to room temperature.

Sweet Pistachio and White Chocolate Pizza on a wooden counter top