Springtime means artichokes, a vegetable I’ve gotten familiar with these past few years, but this spring marks the first time I’ve ever made baby artichokes.
Baby artichokes are a smaller, fully mature variety of the globe artichoke. The fun part about them is that there’s no choke to be found in these little guys, so with a little bit of trimming, the whole thing is edible. I guess they should really be called artis?
Pizza is one of my favorite dinners, especially when it gets warmer out, but when you eat as much pizza as we do, you have to mix it up a bit. One of my favorites, caramelized onion and ricotta pizza, was out because I was out of onions (gasp!), but I liked the idea of a white pizza and had two packs of baby artichokes in my fridge, so this pizza was born.
Now, if it would only stop raining here in NYC so we could enjoy our pizza and a nice glass of wine on the roof!
Feel free to melt some mozzarella or parmesan cheese on top of the artichokes, which would be a nice addition, but we loved it as-is.
Pizza with Baby Artichokes and Lemon Ricotta
Makes 1 pizza
Ingredients:
- 1 pizza dough, homemade or store-bought
- 1 cup ricotta cheese
- 1 lemon, juice (divided) and zest
- 5 baby artichokes
- 1 cup arugula
- olive oil
- salt and pepper
Directions:
- Prepare your pizza dough.
- Preheat oven to 550 degrees, or as high as it goes. If you have a pizza stone, use it (I don’t)!
- Zest the lemon into a bowl, cut it in half and squeeze the juice of half the lemon into the bowl. Mix in the ricotta and add salt and pepper.
- Squeeze the other half of the lemon into a large bowl, fill halfway with water, and set aside.
- Clean, trim and slice artichokes, reserving them in your prepared bowl to prevent browning.
- Spread the ricotta mixture evenly over the pizza dough. Drain and dry artichokes and sprinkle over the cheese.
- Bake for 10 minutes, or until the edges of the crust begin to brown.
- Remove from oven, sprinkle arugula over the pizza, drizzle with olive oil, and return to oven for another minute.
- Crack some black pepper on top, cut and serve immediately.
