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[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
In yesterday's Pizza Lab article about how to make fried pizza, I mentioned that the most popular pie of the night was a breakfast-themed pie. I've got to say that it was one of the most seriously delicious pies to come out of my kitchen, and I'm saying that as one who is not even a huge fan of breakfast pizzas or egg-on-pizza in general.
What made it work so well? I think it was the fact that with regular baked breakfast pizza, you end up with a strange juxtaposition of two things that don't necessarily go well together. The pizza crust is just too, well, pizza crust-y, if you know what I mean. The eggs, sausage, and crust are all great on their own, but they don't come together in a particularly compelling way for me.
Deep frying changes all this.
When you deep fry the dough, you first of all, convert it into a form of food that is at home on the breakfast table—essentially, you've created a giant, yeasted donut. The fried texture of the crust just seems like a natural pair with breakfast foods.
Not only that, but the added slight greasiness helps as well, allowing the pie to meld with the sausage fat and the oozy yolks. The sausage goes on raw in tiny little chunks which just barely cook through and release their juices into the surrounding bread in the short time the pizza spends in the oven after frying.
For this particular pie, I used a homemade breakfast sausage spiked with maple syrup which gives the whole thing a faint sweetness. That whole sweet-salty thing might come up all the time these days, but it's with good reason. I drizzled on a little bit of extra maple syrup just to play it up.
Finally, what would a good breakfast be without hollandaise?
For me, a perfect hollandaise should be creamy, light, and almost fluffy in texture. Josh's recipe is a great start, though personally I like to melt the butter and whisk it in instead of whisking in the solid pats to give the sauce a bit more volume. Either way, drizzle it on after the pie is done cooking, and be generous with it!
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Deep Fried Breakfast Pizza with Sausage, Eggs, Parmesan, and Hollandaise »
About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.
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