Week 12 - Banana

Pineapple is a pretty controversial ingredient on pizza here (we like it), so I can only imagine how people would react if shops started putting bananas on pizza. I was skeptical, but banana curry pizza is so popular on Swedish pizza menus that I felt like we had to give it a try for the banana challenge. I've made banana curry before (for the bananas challenge in 2015 and a few times after that), which was delicious, so I hoped this would be similarly delicious.

I didn't really follow a specific recipe for this, but just read a bunch of different ones (my favorites were these two) and then put together my own version. The ingredients for our version of banana curry pizza were:

- 1 lb of pizza dough

- 1/2 jar (about 7 oz) of pizza sauce

- most of a bag of pizza blend shredded cheese

- 3 slices of black forest ham, torn into pieces [would do more next time]

- 1/2 red onion, thinly sliced

- 2 bananas, sliced

- curry powder

- avocado oil spray

The steps for making the pizza were:

1. Prep - slice onions, slice bananas.

2. Line baking sheet with parchment paper, and spray parchment paper with oil spray.

3. Stretch pizza dough to fit baking sheet. [This was harder than I remembered because it was so elastic and I kept stretching holes in it. I think I need a pizza-making class to learn how to do this properly.]

4. Add toppings in the following order, spreading as evenly as possible over the pizza dough: pizza sauce, pizza cheese (about half of it), ham, red onions, banana, curry powder, rest of the cheese.

5. Bake at 450 degrees for about 20 minutes, until crust is starting to brown and cheese is bubbling.

The pizza was fantastic. We all loved it, and the combination of the bananas, curry, ham, cheese, and sauce just worked. I would definitely make that again. In doing this research, I read that Swedish pizzerias generally have over 50 varieties, so I'm excited to see what other tasty pizzas they've come up with. I can see us making a lot of pizzas for the AtWCC, which I'm sure would be fine with B since he loves pizza so much. I have my eye on a kebab pizza that sounds amazing, so maybe that one will be next!