Pizza with Pear, Ricotta, and Grapes
Sweet pizza is no modern dessert-menu conceit: in southern Italy pizza dolce has long used the same yeasted base for seasonal fruit and fresh cheese, and Tuscany bakes schiacciata all’uva with wine grapes at harvest time. This one carries caramelized pear, torn ricotta, and grapes, with pear-and-hazelnut — a Piedmontese autumn pairing — cooled down by fresh mint.
The order of operations matters more than it looks. Grapes and chopped hazelnuts go onto the raw dough and bake with it at 230°C (445°F), long enough for the grapes to split and shed water and the nuts to toast. The pear is caramelized separately in butter and sugar precisely because on the dough it would weep juice and leave the base soggy rather than crisp. The ricotta is never baked at all — heat pushes out its whey and turns it grainy — so it is broken over the hot pizza with a fork.
Roll the dough thin, 4–5 mm, and give it the full 40 minutes somewhere warm and draft-free; under-proofed, that 260 g (about 2 cups) of flour bakes into a cracker instead of a crust. Almonds or walnuts stand in for hazelnuts, ripe quince for the pear — quince simply needs longer in the pan. Eat it right away, while the pear is hot and the ricotta still cold.
Part of Italian cuisine — 33 more recipes in the section.
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Ingredients
Instructions
Dissolve the yeast in the warm water and mix it with the rest of the dough ingredients. Knead the dough well so it doesn't stick to your hands. Roll the dough into a ball, place it in a bowl, dust it with flour, cover with plastic wrap, and set it in a warm place for 40 minutes.
Roll out the risen dough on a floured surface into a sheet 4-5 mm thick, arrange the grapes and coarsely chopped hazelnuts on top, and place it in an oven preheated to 230°C (445°F) for 15-17 minutes.
Cut the pear into wedges and sear them together with the sugar in a well-heated pan in the butter for 3-4 minutes on each side. Break the ricotta into small pieces with a fork.
Arrange the caramelized pears, ricotta, and mint leaves over the finished pizza.
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