An Overachieving Breakfast Skillet Pizza

Each Thursday, Emily Vikre (a.k.a. fiveandspice) will be sharing a new way to love breakfast—because breakfast isn't just the most important meal of the day. It's also the most awesome.

Today: This breakfast skillet pizza is an overachiever, but some mornings call for a little showing off.

Pizza for breakfast always wins. You could have all the French toast and omelets and pancakes and bacon and granola and smoothies in the world lined up, but when add pizza to the mix, the pizza will win. It’s the natural order of things in the universe. 

Pizza eaten cold from the box on a bleary-eyed morning is strangely meditative and restorative—the mellow-sweet tomato sauce, the cheese, chewy crust. Pizza made fresh in the morning for the express purpose of breakfast is, well, just showing off. But it is also sublime and definitely worth doing every now and then. (And because there’s a crust, there’s no need to make toast!)

A couple of eggs cradled amidst the pizza toppings behave much as they do in shakshuka or in baked eggs: They are perfectly at home. Eggs are fantastic on a standard red sauce and cheese pizza, but I also like to use various vegetables and sauces. Inspired by a pizza in the Eggs edition of Short Stack by Ian Knauer, I decided to have a go with creamed leeks and eggs on pizza, and the result is hearty, rich, and deeply savory. I’ll be making it again and again for breakfast and for dinner. (There’s an idea to tie your brain in a loose knot: Make a breakfast pizza for dinner instead of eating leftover dinner pizza for breakfast. Did you just make breakfast for dinner? Or dinner for dinner, by way of breakfast?)

If you’ve never tried making a skillet pizza, start with this breakfast pizza. You heat a heavy cast-iron skillet on the stovetop until it is blistering hot, then you slide your pizza into the skillet and broil. Using this method, your pizza will cook in just a few minutes (just the right amount of time to set your eggs, in fact). That means that if you’ve prepped your toppings and made your dough the night before (and you should always make your dough the night before anyways—it will develop much better flavor with a slow rise in the refrigerator), you can have fresh pizza in the morning in 15 minutes flat. Now that is showing off. 

Creamed Leek and Egg Skillet Pizza

Makes two 12-inch pizzas

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons warm water
1 teaspoon active dry yeast
1 tablespoon honey
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons fine sea salt
3 cups all-purpose or bread flour
1 rather large leek (or two smaller ones), white and pale green portions only, washed well and thinly sliced
2 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup heavy cream
Salt and pepper
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan
4 to 6 eggs

See the full recipe (and save and print it) here.

Photos by Emily Vikre