The Street Food-Inspired Topping You Need For Fresh, Delicious Pizza

Even the most devoted pizza lover appreciates a switch-up from time to time. That's why we're sharing a surprise twist for fresh, delicious pizza, inspired by the beloved elote street food. Elote is one of the most popular preparations in casual Mexican cuisine, most commonly appearing as topped Mexican street corn. Our Tasting Table recipe developer Miriam Hahn offers her own take on elote with the grilled summer elote flatbread recipe, which employs grilled flatbread, charred corn, and other standard elote ingredients to construct a creamy, spicy alternative to standard Italian-style pizza. 

Hahn's elote recipe stands alone as a must-try flatbread treat, but it can also serve as a springboard for expanded pizza experimentation. The elote ingredients themselves — however you implement them — can transform even the most basic pizza into a culinary masterpiece. Your bag of stand-alone topping tricks include grilled corn kernels, red pepper, red onion, Cotija cheese, and cilantro to be incorporated into whatever type of pizza you're creating. 

But if you're going for the full creamy elote experience on top of pizza crust or flatbread, you'll make a saucy dressing out of sour cream, mayonnaise, chili powder, cayenne pepper, salt, and lime juice, and then combine it with the corn, onion, cotija cheese, cilantro, and red pepper. Whichever route you take, there's always room for exploring with a bit of this, a bit of that, and a whole lot of creativity.

In Hahn's elote flatbread pizza rendition, there's no tomato sauce and no mozzarella cheese involved. It instead calls for Cotija, an aged white cheese that's a staple in Mexican cooking. However, it's okay to substitute more readily available types of cheese, such as feta, queso fresco, parmesan, or pecorino, which have either similar textures or flavors; you'll still get the essential elote flavors and vibe. 

Corn is the core ingredient in elote; in fact, the word "elote" actually means "fresh corn" in English. Even if not using the full Mexican elote sauce to jazz up your pizza, corn kernels on their own can create some topping magic. Try scattering them across your pizza crust as a topping along with some chopped basil, diced peppers, garlic, lemon pepper, and ricotta cheese. It's less saucy than elote-style pizza but similarly creamy.

If you're really feeling experimental, put that corn to work in a traditional-style pizza but with a velvety sauce made of sweetcorn puree. The idea of using corn this way springs from the culinary genius of renowned chef Gordon Ramsay, whose method is part of our 13 tips from celebrity chefs to make the ultimate pizza. Other than the corn-based sauce, you can proceed to make the pizza with an array of typical pizza toppings — or whatever else strikes your fancy.