Cantaloupe Prosciutto Pizza

Sweet juicy cantaloupe with salty crispy prosciutto and gooey cheese in a simple summer pizza

My family are not big melon fans. Yes, we like watermelon--and what was looking like a watermelon-shaped zucchini is resolving into a tall pumpkin-shaped squash (I'll throw a photo of my garden up on my FB page)--but honeydew, muskmelon, and bitter melon are not high on the list of 'must eat' summer fruits.

Cantaloupe used to be on this list until I wrapped a piece of prosciutto around a slice from our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share.  Wow.  The combination of dry and salty with the wet and sweet melon? Amazing. Try it, please, if you eat meat.

Last summer with just the 3 of us [while my spouse was on his all expense paid trip to exotic locales] we were having trouble eating whole melons. The composting pigs offered their services at cantaloupe disposal loudly and frequently, but I wanted to try my hand at a cantaloupe pizza. For no particular reason I'd picked up one of those rolled prosciutto and mozzarella logs at Aldi [and then paid for it during check out, no shenanigans implied] and I decided to try slices on a cantaloupe pizza.

I kept this pizza ridiculously simple, with just those two items as toppings, because I was simultaneously canning, as you can see from this kitchen scene above. With that much going on just slicing and dumping the stuff on an olive oil-brushed dough is pretty easy.

This is pretty good! The heat brings out even more sweetness from the fruit, and the prosciutto gets all crispy while the mozzarella runs all over the place like a toddler on cupcakes.

Cantaloupe Prosciutto Pizza 

1 pound pizza dough (or skip all the first bits and use a pre baked shell)

1-2 Tablespoons olive oil

1 cup cantaloupe, sliced into bite-sized chunks

1 prosciutto/mozzarella roll, sliced thinly

Preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. On an oiled piece of parchment stretch dough out into the best you can come up with today, and brush the crust with some olive oil. Top with cantaloupe and prosciutto roll, evenly spaced. Bake for 5 to 8 minutes, then shimmy the paper out from underneath and bake directly on pizza stone for another 3 minutes until the mozzarella is bubbly and the prosciutto is crisp. Serve.

Behind the scenes--canning tomatoes and . . . something? I think blueberry lemon syrup.