I was searching for fall baking recipes that involved figs, and I found a lot of tarts using puff pastry, but I know that my husband would much prefer a pizza to that.
So I made this fig and prosciutto pizza to test the combination out, based on a bunch of recipes that had similar ingredients but slightly different presentations.
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Recipe for Fig and Prosciutto Pizza
Here’s the recipe, but scroll down for tips on putting this together, because there are things I would potentially change.
Savory Fig and Prosciutto Pizza with Caramelized Onions and Feta
Equipment
- 1 pizza pan or sheet pan
- 1 frying pan
- 1 Chef's knife or slicing food processor
Ingredients
- 1 pizza dough, either homemade or store-bought
- olive oil
- 1 large red onion
- 3-4 ounces shredded mozzarella or provolone cheese
- 4-5 slices thinly-sliced prosciutto
- 7-8 figs
- 2-3 ounces crumbled feta
Instructions
- Heat the oven to 400 degrees F
- Slice the onion into thin slices, starting from the top and cutting through to the stem end.
- Heat olive oil in a pan over medium heat and add the onions. Stirring occasionally to prevent burning, heat them until they turn golden brown and are caramelized. Add more oil if they start sticking to the pan, and reduce the heat if anything starts to burn! This can take a while depending on how hot the pan is, so plan for 20-25 minutes at least.
- Take the pan with the onions off the heat and get the pizza dough ready.
- Oil the pizza pan using some olive oil and spread the dough in the pan by pressing it out with your hands. If the dough bounces back and won't stretch out, leave it alone for 5 minutes so that the gluten can relax, then keep spreading it out.
- Sprinkle the shredded mozzarella or provolone evenly on the pizza, using more or less to taste.
- Spread the onions on the pizza evenly.
- Cut the figs into either thick slices or into quarters, and place on the pizza.
- Tear the prosciutto into pieces and spread on the top of the pizza.
- Sprinkle 2-3 ounces of crumbled feta cheese on the pizza.
- Bake for 18-20 minutes. The toppings have a lot of moisture in them, so if you added more onions or figs it might take longer to bake the dough completely through the center. The edge of the pizza will look golden brown but the center of the dough might not be completely baked through, so test it by sticking a knife in the center to test for doughiness.
- Remove from the oven and let the pizza sit for 5 minutes, then de-pan it and cut into 8 pieces to serve.
Pizza assembly and baking tips.
The good thing about making a pizza is that you can really put anything on it, and unless you go completely wild you’re probably not going to ruin it.
There are so many toppings that you can use, you can definitely create your own combinations or substitute things in this recipe for other things that you might prefer.
When you cut the onion up, make sure that the slices are evenly sized, but you don’t need to make sure that they’re all little slivers.
As long as they’re relatively the same thickness they’ll cook evenly, and they’ll wilt down enough that the shape that they started out being isn’t as important in the end.
Depending on how high the heat is on the stove, the onions can burn if you don’t keep them moving a lot.
A lot of people say to cook onions on low heat to prevent burning, but I ended up turning the heat up to speed the process, and I just stirred them constantly so that there wouldn’t be any hot spots in the pan.
When they get to be a golden color, they’ll be fine to use on the pizza.
I didn’t add any sugar or anything else to the onions while they were cooking. Onions have plenty of sugar in them to begin with, so heating them up just makes that sugar caramelize and you don’t really need to add anything else.
However, if you want to add some flavoring like balsamic vinegar or salt, that works fine too. A lot of recipes for caramelized onions call for butter, and that’s the traditional way to do it, but since butter has such a low burn point I didn’t want to use it, and I stuck with the olive oil instead.
Using butter might give you a little bit of a richer flavor, so it’s totally up to you what oil to use.
What type of pizza dough you use is also completely up to you. I decided to use a store-bought pizza dough instead of making my own this time. To make your own, check out my recipe for a basic pizza dough here.
If you’re trying to spread the dough out in the pan and it’s not wanting to do that because it keeps bouncing back, it just means that the gluten in the dough hasn’t relaxed enough.
You should let it rest and relax a little bit, just back away for 10 minutes, then come back and spread it out a little more until it starts fighting you again.
Eventually you’ll be able to spread it out either to fill up the entire pan or just as much as you need to make the pizza size that you want.
I use a decent amount of olive oil in the bottom of the pan when I spread pizza dough out, but too much is going to make the dough really soft.
Start on the low side with the amount of oil, and then add a little bit more if the dough starts sticking to the pan.
If the dough is sticking to the pan while it’s baking it’s just going to be harder to remove, and that’s what you want to avoid.
When you add the first layer of cheese on, you can go as heavy as you want, but this is really just to give you a little bit of extra flavor.
I used to use only mozzarella on pizza that I made, but then one of my friends whose father owned a pizzeria told me to use provolone.
I think that the combination of mozzarella and provolone is really good because it gives you a little extra tangy flavor.
When you put the onions on the pizza, try to spread them out evenly so that there isn’t one area of the pizza that has too much moisture on it.
Because there’s so much moisture on this pizza after all the toppings are put on, it can be pretty wet when it cooks.
That can prevent the pizza crust from baking all the way through, so you want to kind of spread everything out so that the crust bakes evenly in the center.
When I put the figs on I cut them really thin, and I think I should have left them in quarters instead.
When the finished pizza was baked it was a good flavor when you bit into a fig because you got a little bit of the sweetness, but it was really subtle.
Depending on how much sweetness you want on the pizza, you can either slice them the way that I did, or quarter them and just place them around different parts of the pizza. That way, everybody who gets a slice is going to get about the same amount of fig.
I ripped the prosciutto into pieces that were about 3 inches long, and it had been cut thin, so it cooked up pretty evenly and crispy.
You can cut the prosciutto into smaller pieces if you want more of a spread-out type of salt flavor on each piece of pizza.
The last step was the feta cheese. I decided to use feta instead of goat cheese, which is what a lot of recipes called for.
However, I don’t like goat cheese, and I didn’t want to have that touching my pizza and ruining it.
The feta still gave it that nice tangy flavor, but I didn’t feel like I had just been to the petting zoo and licked a goat.
So you can use whatever kind of cheese you want, but to get that blend of flavors it should be one that has more of a bite to it like feta, blue cheese, or goat cheese if you so desire.
I baked the pizza for 15 minutes and then I realized that it wasn’t baked all the way through in the very center of the pizza.
I put it back in the oven for another 10 minutes and it was a little crispier than I would have liked.
So I will revert back to my normal pizza baking time of 18-20 minutes, which pretty much is what I always bake a homemade pizza at.
This was a 400° oven, so if you’re baking at a lower or higher temperature your baking time is going to have to be adjusted.
There’s so much juice from the figs and moisture in the onions that it definitely could affect how fast the dough bakes all the way through.
I guess if you wanted to drain the figs before you bake it, or let the onions sit on a paper towel to get some of the oil off of them, you could do that.
But this pizza was so good it didn’t matter. By the time it had baked all the way and was done, it was honestly one of the best pizzas I have ever had.
Fig alternatives if you don’t have any.
If you don’t have any figs, you could use pineapple on this pizza because it would give you the same sweet flavor to take the place of what the figs accomplish in the flavor blend.
It’s really the combination of the sweetness of the figs, the saltiness of the prosciutto, and the tanginess of the cheese that made this pizza so good, in my opinion.
My husband said that it was the onions, so he had a different opinion, but both of us agreed that this pizza was well worth making, and that I’ll be making it again soon.
Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements or flavor enhancements because I’m always open to that, and I would love to try out slightly different combinations if anyone has ideas.
