BLT Pizza: easy dinner with your last best tomatoes
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BLT pizza is easy homemade pizza built on a quick high hydration pizza crust, covered with your favorite cheese, then baked before topping with juicy seasoned tomatoes, bacon, and peppery arugula and a tangy mayo drizzle.
Fun fact: my husband and I were able to honeymoon in Italy (work trip I got to tag along for!). Pizza in Italy is pretty simple in comparison to our various American styles. One thing I loved was how they would often put salad on pizza. I’m not a fan of lettuce, but other greens, like arugula, lightly wilted from the heat of hot pizza is the better way to eat salad.
It’s hard not to love a BLT anyhow. When tomatoes are at their juiciest, it’s so so good to slice them up, sprinkle with salt and pepper and serve them with your best bacon.
So this pizza is the best of all possible worlds: better lettuce stand in, good mayo, the best tomatoes, and of course bacon.
Let’s make this.
BLT Pizza
Why BLT Pizza is the best of the last of summer
- Good tomatoes: if you have garden tomatoes, you already know they’re the tippity top of awesomeness where the bacon, lettuce, and tomato is concerned. Even if you don’t have the best tomatoes, we’ll make them better by seasoning them to bring them back to life.
- Bacon, lettuce and tomato is kind of magic: I’d have to stop being American if I didn’t love bacon, as I suspect the same for you. Crispy, fatty, smoky are all the best things that go with the acid of the tomatoes and the spicy bite of arugula.
- Easy dough: I love love this dough. You can make it by hand and generally neglect it and it will do all the work for you. As long as you can get your oven screaming hot, you’ll end up with light, crispy pizza.
Ingredients for the perfect homemade BLT flatbread pizza
Pizza dough
- Water: filtered or spring water if you can. It really will taste better.
- Yeast
- Flour: all-purpose or 00 if you have it.
- Olive oil
- Salt
Toppings
- Mayo drizzle: mayo, sour cream, lemon, and chopped basil, salt, pepper
- Sour cream: in place of pizza sauce; it adds moisture and a little more contrast with the bacon
- Tomatoes: good slicers, the nicest you can find, or use Roma if it’s January and you want BLT Pizza regardless
- Bacon: use your favorite
- Arugula: spinach is okay too
Ideal timeline for making pizza with bacon, lettuce, and tomatoes
- Day before baking: make up the dough. After the folds, cover and let it rest in the fridge.
- When you’re ready to bake: Set the dough out on the counter to warm up while you cook the bacon.
- Bake the bacon: Bake the bacon until crispy. Save the fat–you’ll an extra light and crisp, more flavorful crust if you grease your sheet tray with the bacon fat. Drain the bacon, and chop or crumble it into pieces.
- Preheat the pizza stone: Keep the oven on and add a pizza stone if you have it, raising the temperature of the oven as high as it’ll go. No pizza stone? Use an overturned sheet tray in the oven.
- Stretch the dough: Divide the dough in half, smear some bacon fat on 2 sheet trays and pan the dough out. Gradually stretch the dough into the corners of the pan.
- Top and bake: Spread sour cream over the stretched dough, then scatter grated cheese (cheddar and American are what I used, though a proper pizza cheese like Fontina is wonderful here).
- Season the tomatoes: While the pizza is in the oven, slice the tomatoes. Spread them on a large plate and sprinkle them with salt and pepper.
- Mix the dressing: Mix the mayo drizzle ingredients together. Toss the arugula with a spoonful of the dressing.
- Finish: Top the hot pizza with the arugula, tomato slices, and bacon.
Ways to change up your pizza
- Peaches or pears/arugula/proscuitto: Use peaches or pears in place of the tomatoes and prosciutto in place of the bacon. Dollops of goat cheese are really good on this combo.
- Different green herbs: I put basil in the dressing this time, but dill, parsley, or cilantro or even tarragon would also be delicious.
- Use different cheese: This is a pizza you really don’t need cheese for, but if you add it, anything goes. This is not a traditional Italian pizza, so use what’s good! If it tastes good with bacon, it will taste good here. Blue cheese, Fontina, goat cheese, Swiss, good Cheddar–there are no losers here.
- Make it dairy-free: skip the sour cream and sprinkle with a good dairy free cream cheese. I used Miyoko’s sun dried tomato. You can place dollops of it on the crust before baking, or sprinkle dollops on the arugula after baking.
- Use Pita Bread: For individual pizzas, pita bread makes a great base for pizza. A quick run in even a toaster oven, and you have an almost instant version of this recipe provided you made the pita ahead of time. I often make pita just for freezing for easy pizza later.
BLT Pizza
- Total Time: 1 day 46 minutes
- Yield: 24 pieces
Description
Simple overnight pizza dough stretched into a thin crust wonder topped with peppered tomatoes, perfect bacon and mayo drizzled arugula. This is the best of summer on a plate.
Ingredients
Scale
Dough
- 1 pound all-purpose flour or 00 pizza flour (454 g)
- 1 teaspoon instant yeast
- 1 and 1/4 cups water (295 mL)
- 2 Tablespoons olive oil (30 mL), plus extra for drizzling
- 1 teaspoon salt
Toppings
- 1 pound bacon (a 12 oz package is okay too)
- 1/2 cup sour cream
- Salt and pepper
- 8 oz grated cheese (American and Cheddar, or whatever you like) (227 g)
- 1 pound ripe tomatoes, preferably ones good for slicing (454 g)
- 5 oz arugula
Lemon Basil Mayo drizzle
- 1/4 cup mayonnaise
- 1/4 cup sour cream
- Juice of half a lemon
- Salt and pepper to taste
- Handful of fresh basil or other soft green herbs (dill, parsley, cilantro, tarragon), finely chopped
Instructions
For the dough
- Mix all ingredients with a spoon in a mixing bowl.
The dough will be shaggy and rough, but don’t worry about it. Briefly knead the dough just to pick up any loose flour from the bottom of the bowl. - Drizzle the dough with a little olive oil, then cover to rest for 20 minutes.
- After 20 minutes, scoop under the dough with an oiled hand, bringing the dough back onto itself in the middle. Do this on each side of the dough (north, south, east, and west if you want to think of the dough like a compass).
- Cover and rest for another 20 minutes. Repeat the dough folds.
- Repeat this process one more time. Notice how much smoother and elastic the dough is.
- After 3 rounds of folding, cover the dough to rest in the fridge for at least 8 hours and up to 24.
Make the pizza
- Heat the oven to 425F (220 C). Bake the bacon on a parchment lined sheet tray for 10-15 minutes until crispy. Drain the bacon and chop it into pieces. Save the bacon fat.
- Place a pizza stone inside your oven if you have one (use an upside-down sheet tray if you don’t). Turn up the heat to the highest heat it can go. My oven goes to 500 F (260 C), though every oven I’ve owned before now tops out around 450 F. Just know you’ll have to bake your pizza a little longer if you have a thicker crust or a lower temp.
- Divide the dough in half. This is enough dough for 2 half sheet pans of thin crust pizza.
- Drizzle about a tablespoon of olive oil over each sheet tray or smear them with about the same amount of bacon fat leftover from cooking the bacon.
- Lightly pat out the dough into the center of the sheet tray. Do the same to the second sheet tray.
- Let the dough rest for a minute or so, then begin stretching it outwards towards the edges of the pan. Stop stretching when the dough springs back on you. Moving from one sheet to the other will give the first dough some time to relax before you work it again. Over about 10 minutes you should be able to stretch the dough all the way to the edge before it snaps back.
- Cover the pans each with a clean kitchen towel until the oven is at full heat. Ideally, you should preheat the stone for about 20 minutes before baking.
- Spread some of the sour cream over one of the pizza crusts in a thin layer. Sprinkle over some salt and pepper. Cover the sour cream with about half the cheese.
- Bake the crust for 10 minutes.
- Meanwhile, prepare the toppings. Cut the tomatoes into slices between ¼” and ½” thick. Lay them on a large plate and sprinkle with salt and pepper.
- Mix the dressing ingredients together in a small bowl.
- After 10 minutes of baking, lift the pizza crust out of the pan and place it directly on the pizza stone (or the overturned pizza crust) and bake for 3 more minutes until the bottom is light and crusty, the cheese is starting to brown and the crust holds together well.
- Toss a few handfuls of arugula in a bowl with about a tablespoon of the dressing.
- Top the baked pizza with the dressed arugula, tomato slices, and half the bacon. Drizzle the mayo over the pizza before cutting.
- Repeat the baking for the second pizza.
- Pizza is best eaten straight away, though leftovers are still good refrigerated for a couple days.
Notes
Dairy free version: skip the sour cream and add dollops of Miyoko’s Cream Cheese (cashew based) with the arugula. It tastes just like goat cheese!
- Prep Time: 20 minutes active time + 24 hours refrigerator time
- Cook Time: 26 minutes for 2 pizzas
- Category: Pizza
- Method: Oven
- Cuisine: Italian
