Maple Apples, Blue Cheese and Bacon Pizza

This pizza started out as sushi. Well, sort of.

After getting my roots done this week (just in the nick of time) I hit the bookstore to try and find the latest issue of my favorite foodie inspiration Donna Hay magazine (to no avail) and ended up soaking in a few other publications (rags) instead. Mila and Ashton had their baby! Get ripped abs in 10 easy steps! Theresa and Joe go to jail! Celebrity beach bodies gone wrong! Who wore it best? For sure, she did!

Ugh, why did I wander away from the food magazines?

Afterward, I walked over to Whole Foods to cure my craving for lunch-on-the-go-sushi. Instead, I left with a new craving and all of the makings for this pizza.

Back in the day when I had an out-of-the-house-job (I’m not going to call it “when I had a full-time job” because what I do now is definitely full-time+++), Whole Foods was right across the street from my office. It made bringing lunches from home far too hard to pull together when I could simply hit the crosswalk button and dodge the bad drivers who always ran the turn light for a lunch pit stop at the Whole Foods sushi counter.

Spicy tuna rolls with avocado and brown rice with a lime flavored Italian sparkling mineral water. That was my ritual.

So after my bookstore run I had a rekindling of those office work days and paid a visit to the WFM sushi counter.

But my sushi intentions were spoiled, because they were giving away samples of pizza. THIS pizza.

So I bought up all of the ingredients, minus the apples since I have a crisper full after over-zealously purchasing at the farmer’s market, and said “see ‘ya” to the sushi dude then came home and made me a pizza.

Thinly sliced apples soaked in maple syrup and topped with roasted garlic and blue cheese and gooed up with melty cheese. And bacon! All on a soft, supple, finally-I-cooked-it-perfectly pizza dough.

About the recipe:

While I usually make my dough from scratch, I saved myself some lunch break time and used the store-bought variety. You’ll only use half of the dough for two 4-slice pizzas so save the rest for killer garlic rolls and stuffed pizza rolls.

I also considered roasting my own garlic, simply because I love the aroma in my kitchen, but with time of the essence, I cruised the olive bar and BOOM! I had 3 heads of roasted garlic in under a minute.

I was super happy to see my WFM carrying a Wisconsin-bred blue cheese from Roth Kase. Stinky cow’s milk cheese makes me happy.

The apples are soaked in maple syrup before going on the pizza. Be sure to thinly slice the apples so they soften as they cook in the 8-10 minutes it takes for the pizza to bake. Then drizzle a little more syrup on the finished product for that bit of sweet to compliment the salty bacon and blue cheese.

I usually use a ceramic pizza round to cook my at-home pizza but this time around I borrowed form my mom’s version of homemade pizza and used a baking sheet. Just like we used to do as a kid.

4.88 from 16 votes