So Easy: Egg, Ham, and Spinach Pizza

Egg, Ham, and Spinach Pizza (pg 99) is exactly what it sounds like. I went in thinking of it less as a pizza, and more as an open-faced sandwich. Take a store-bought whole wheat pizza crust, dump a butt-load of sliced spinach on it with a drizzle of olive oil, prosciutto, garlic, and grated parmesan cheese. Make four wells in the spinach, and break an egg into each. Then you bake for 12-15 minutes "until the spinach is wilted and the egg whites are fully cooked." In her intro to the recipe, Ellie says that the first time she had egg on a pizza "it was a revelation. When you cut into the egg, the yolk oozes out over the tender greens and crisp crust."

On closer reading, I realized that she was not waxing rhapsodic about this version of a pizza, but something she ate in Italy. I checked my pizza at 12 minutes, and the yolks were completely cooked, while the whites were not set yet. Because they were confined to these spinach wells, the white part was deeper than it would be just on a pan. By the time the whites cooked, there was no chance of any lovely oozing yolk. The yolk cooked faster than anything else on the pie, spinach and prosciutto included. Very disappointing.

I'm not opposed to having hard boiled eggs on a pizza. I ate that in Rome, and it was good. Not my favorite pizza topping of all time, but I still enjoyed it. The egg on this pizza was nasty. The texture was weird. I can't describe it. A little gritty, maybe? and the white seemed to cook in layers, so there were striations of toughness as I bit down. I pulled the rest of my egg off the pizza. Yuck.

On the plus side, the spinach did provide a nice faux-cheese layer of softness as you bit down, and the prosciutto crisped nicely, with its grease flavoring the rest of the pie.

Conclusion: Without the egg, just okay. With the egg, disliked. Since a key part of the recipe is the egg, I'm going to have to go with Dislike on this one.