Last summer, I got my husband a pizza oven for his birthday, which was a serious win-win for the whole household.
After we’d run through the classics, our pizzas started getting a little less traditional. Whatever we had lurking in the back of the fridge got thrown on a slab of dough and hurled into the oven. Corn, basil, goat cheese, and ricotta isn’t the strangest pizza combo out there, but it’s always just interesting enough to win the delight of dinner guests.
One of my all-time favorite cooking resources is called The Flavor Bible; instead of recipes it features an extensive index of flavor pairings. Look up “corn” and you’ll get a long list of everything corn pairs well with, totally subjective but compiled and agreed upon by hundreds of chefs and culinary experts. It’s my favorite resource to pull out when I’ve got a fair amount of ingredients lying around but no real plan for what to do with them. And it’s my favorite way to discover fun pizza toppings that might already be right in front of me.
Tangy goat cheese and sweet (sometimes spicy) honey has always been one of my all-time favorite flavor pairings, a blend of sweet and tart that I just can’t resist, whether it’s on a pizza, pasta dish, or even a dessert. A little bit of heat from hot honey (my current obsession) adds the perfect amount of complexity to this pizza, but you can drizzle regular honey on in its place if you’re averse to spice.
For this recipe, I leaned on the classic, but never boring, 9” Chef Knife. Wielding a full size chef knife in the kitchen always gives me that extra boost of confidence to take on whatever’s in front of me, and I love how precise this one can be. It’s just as rock solid chopping basil for garnish as it is slicing up a full-size pizza into party-ready bites. Sharpness is key when slicing corn kernels off the cob, so it goes without saying that this knife is essential.
Corn, Basil and Hot Honey Pizza
Makes one 12” pizza
Ingredients:
Directions: