Eggplant Parmigiana Pizza

September 21, 2017

Servings: 4

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The perfect pie to spice up pizza night! I promise this will give you a whole new appreciation for eggplant.

By: A Wholesome New World

Ingredients

• 1 lb eggplant, peeled and thinly sliced
• 2 egg whites, lightly beaten
• 1⁄2 cup Italian breadcrumbs (or homemade seasoned breadcrumbs if you're feeling ambitious!)
• Yellow cornmeal, for dusting
• 1 homemade pizza crust (store-bought is fine too)
• 1 cup pasta sauce of your choice
• 8 oz log of mozzarella cheese, sliced into rounds 1/4 inch wide
• 1⁄4 cup diced pancetta (optional, or any meat of choice)
• Grated Parmesan cheese and red pepper flakes for serving

Directions

• Step 1 Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Spray a large baking sheet with cooking spray. Dip eggplant slices one by one into eggwhite, then breadcrumbs.
• Step 2 Arrange coated eggplant slices on baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes. Flip slices over and bake for 10 minutes longer or until browned on both sides.
• Step 3 Increase oven heat to 450 degrees. Coat the pizza stone lightly with cornmeal so the pizza won’t stick. Roll out pizza crust to the size of your stone either on the stone or to the side, on a non-stick surface (ie. wax paper).
• Step 4 Top pizza crust with pasta sauce, then layer evenly with eggplant rounds and slices of mozzarella cheese. Add other desired toppings (like pancetta).
• Step 5 Bake for 15-20 minutes until golden brown. Cut into slices, sprinkle with fresh Parmesan and red pepper flakes and serve hot.

I feel like we are going through a pizza kick at our house lately. We have owned a pizza stone for years, but now that Marc learned how to make fresh pizza dough in his bread maker (the absolutely hands down best gadget in our kitchen!), we don’t have much of an excuse not to indulge in pizza night anymore. Being from New York, good take-out pizza obviously isn’t that hard to find, but I think it has actually made us all the more picky about what we expect from a good pizza.  And now that we have discovered that a delicious pizza is as close as our very own oven, it’s changed everything!  The dough is so easy to make that you can whip up any pizza for a weeknight dinner, it’s really not that time-consuming. We are experimenting with all different kinds of pizza variations now, including this eggplant parm pizza, which in my opinion was to die for.  Even if you don’t think you like eggplant, I promise you will love this pizza!

The inspiration actually came from my best friend Kiele’s neighborhood Brooklyn pizza joint, Francesco’s, where one night this summer we ordered one of the best slices of pizza I’ve had in years. We decided to try replicating it on our own (using fresh eggplant from the farmers market) and I would say we definitely did it justice.

Farmer’s market finds:

Eggplant slices meet fresh breadcrumbs:

If you don’t have a bread maker, you can totally substitute store-made pizza dough, or if you’re feeling really ambitious, make your own. I will be posting a pizza dough recipe I often use for my calzones, so keep an eye out for that! Our bread maker did double duty for this recipe: for the eggplant coating, we actually made homemade breadcrumbs from a day old crusty bread (see above). We crumbled the bread then minced it further in a food processor. We then toasted the crumbs lightly on the stove and seasoned them with Italian seasoning. You can just use Italian bread crumbs of course, but we wanted to use as many homemade ingredients as possible for this recipe. Next time we’ll be making our own pizza sauce too!

A note about toppings: We are big fans of the meat lovers special, so we couldn’t quite resist adding pancetta to ours (bacon would also be a great addition), but the eggplant is meaty unto itself, you really don’t need the meat unless you want it. Any other toppings are obviously fair game too – go crazy if you want to!