Top Your Quesadillas With Pizza Ingredients To Create The Ultimate 2-In-1 Snack

Pizzas and quesadillas are prime examples of simple few-ingredient recipes that have been adapted to the resources and cooking styles of culinary traditions around the world. The cheesy, flat-bread foundations also facilitate the fusion of quesadillas and pizza as the ultimate two-in-one snack.

Tortillas are the perfect vessel to house toppings like cheese and serve as the crispy crust to a personal-sized pizza. The idea is to top a quesadilla with pizza ingredients. So, you'll start by assembling and cooking a quesadilla as usual. Then, you'll spread pizza sauce, toppings, and more cheese on top before a second round of cooking.

You can make the quesadilla on the stove in a cast-iron skillet, add the toppings, and then place the quesadilla-pizza under the broiler for five minutes to melt the cheese. You can also use the oven by adapting this sheet-pan quesadilla recipe, making a giant quesadilla using multiple overlapping flour tortillas. Fold the excess tortilla over to create the quesadilla, top with another sheet pan, and bake it in the oven at 425 degrees Fahrenheit. However, when you remove the top sheet pan to bake it for another five minutes, you'll add a slather of marina sauce and another layer of cheese, as well as other pizza toppings.

Even air fry quesadillas can be modified for this combo: Add pizza toppings to folded air fryer quesadillas after flipping them halfway through, using the remaining time in the air-fryer to melt the toppings.

Just as there are a million topping possibilities for pizza, there's an equally vast array of quesadilla-pizza combinations. A flour tortilla is as neutral as a pizza dough, so you can use classic Italian pizza ingredients, like mozzarella, marinara or tomato sauce, and a sprinkling of Italian seasoning for a take on a simple cheese slice. If you're not a fan of red pizza, you can use a jar of alfredo sauce or store-bought pesto.

Don't be afraid to fuse Mexican and Italian ingredients like Monterey Jack cheese with Italian seasonings or mozzarella with a dusting of taco seasonings. Chorizo is essentially the Mexican version of Italian sausage, while pepperoni and pickled jalapeños are already a well-known fusion combination. You could add marinara and Monterey Jack cheese as the quesadilla filling and marinara, mozzarella, pepperoni, and jalapeños as pizza toppings, finishing it all off with a drizzle of honey.

You can opt for a pizza-quesadilla with a heavier Mexican influence, too. For example, you can stuff the quesadilla with roasted poblanos and crumbled chorizo, then top the pizza with tomato sauce, shredded mozzarella, kernels of corn, red onions, and black olives. Another option is top a shredded chicken quesadilla with chipotle mayo, shredded asadero, black beans, and thinly sliced mushrooms.