Summer Squash Pizza
Stop what you’re doing. Dinner tonight is the very best kind there is: it has five ingredients including the ones to make the pizza dough. It’s seasonal, which means you can use it to decimate your CSA pile-up. And it doesn’t care what else you had in mind; recipes like this exist to disrupt the best-laid meal plans and that’s my favorite thing about them. It is, in fact, pretty much the only thing I want out of any dish, for it, at least for a time to be the thing you have to eat next because now nothing else will do.
I fully expected it to contain a grocery cart full of ingredients, as cheffy creations often do, a minimum of sharp cheese, garlic, maybe anchovies, perhaps oregano and definitely 10 other things, probably hard to get. And then I Googled it and learned that Jim Lahey makes the topping with exactly three things — shredded zucchini, shredded gruyere and a sprinkling of breadcrumbs — which along with the pizza dough (flour, yeast) brings us to five ingredients and now dinner is sorted. I used a mix of summer squash, you can only use zucchini, it doesn’t matter. You can use a storebought or homemade dough, you could bake this topping onto toasts, zucchini melt-style, you can add other ingredients (a schmear of black olive paste underneath, an egg on top) but you don’t need to make a pizza you’re going to repeat until the zucchini overpopulation recedes.
Ingredients:
- 1 tablespoon olive oil, plus more for fingertips
- 1 recipe pizza dough or about a 2/3 volume of my lazy fitted-to-your-schedule favorite or your favorite, whichever it may be
- 2 1/2 pounds (about 5 small-medium or 3 large) zucchini or other summer squash, trimmed
- 1 1/2 teaspoons fine sea salt
- 2 cups (8 ounces) coarsely grated gruyere cheese
- 2 to 3 tablespoons plain breadcrumbs