Topping Pizza With Salad May Feel Wrong But It Tastes So Right

With the gooey cheese, savory toppings, and soft – or crisp – pizza crust set before you, why would you focus on the salad? The wilted greens and sour tomatoes in the pizza place's side salad are what you begrudgingly order when you remind yourself that you need to eat more veggies. It may just seem like a strange shortcut to eating more greens, but placing salad on top of pizza is more delicious than it seems.

Pizzas are often thick, with the combination of melted cheese and oozing sauce creating a heavy meal. Combining that with a light salad may seem like they're not a match. When making a salad pizza, forego the sauce. Instead, bake the dough brushed with olive oil in the oven and top it off with the salad right before serving, resulting in a refreshing, and filling, meal. Depending on what kind of salad you're going for, you can bake ingredients like chicken or mushrooms along with the dough to lean into the pizza part of the dish. Read ahead for more salad pizza recipe ideas.

Since placing fresh salad on top of pizza already breaks the rules, lean even more into the weirdness and try a sweet and savory Italian salad pizza. Our recipe developer Taylor Murray switches things up by placing sweet, tangy nectarines on top of white pizza. Toss the arugula and prosciutto with slices of nectarines to put on the salad afterwards, or bake the fruit with a sprinkle of sugar to caramelize them.

If you prefer things a bit more traditional, take a classic Caesar salad and put it on your pizza. After sprinkling parmesan on the dough, add slices of slightly-cooked chicken breast to it before baking in the oven. While the pizza bakes, prepare the rest of the Caesar salad and place it on top of the pizza once it's done in the oven.

For the veggie pizza lovers, a chopped salad is the perfect topping for a pizza. With the pizza in the oven, cut up red onions, cherry tomatoes, romaine lettuce, Kalamata olives, carrots, and cucumbers. Toss the ingredients in a vinaigrette before putting everything on top of the pizza.