Deep Dish Green Tomato & Goat Cheese Pizza

Green tomatoes and goat cheese add fresh flavor to the classic deep dish sausage pizza.

For more recipes using green tomatoes (none of them fried) please see my Green Tomato Recipes Collection, part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient, a resource for folks like me eating up the farm share, the garden abundance, and what's ripe at the local farmer's market. Want to know How to Use this Blog? Click here.

I think too many people think the only way to eat a green tomato is to fry it.  Not me.  Green tomatoes are a terrific vegetable to play with, and I like them so much I actually canned some last year.  The year before I froze some--and I'm here to tell ya that either way (chopping & freezing or chopping & boiling water bath canning) you can put up green tomatoes and use them year round. Please try them--and not in 'fried green tomatoes' form, either, though the inspiration for the goat cheese in this pizza came from a grilled goat cheese and fried green tomato sandwich. I suppose fried green tomatoes are good for something after all.

Now, I'll have more to say about green tomatoes next week, when I get my Green Tomato Curry post up. In the meantime, I spent the past 36 hours canning 7 quarts of tomato sauce from the (red) paste tomatoes in my garden plus 14 pints of salsa from a tiny fraction of the canning tomatoes I bought from our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share. I also did this:

And between all the canning and all the walking, I'd rather just get this recipe up and go to bed.
It's a tasty pizza, and an easy spinoff of my How Not To Make Lou Malnati's Chicago Style Deep Dish Pizza method. [Got red tomatoes? Make that. Vegetarian? I'm working on it. I just love that disc of sausage too much to think of alternatives.]

For general hints, tips, and photo collages please check out my Pizza Primer post, a brain dump of all things related to making pizza in my home kitchen.

Deep Dish Green Tomato and Goat Cheese Pizza 

1 Tablespoon vegetable oil

⅓ to ½ pound Italian sausage

1½ to 2 cups chopped green tomatoes, simmered 20 minutes then drained

½ teaspoon honey 

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon pepper

1 teaspoon Pasta Sprinkle or other Italian blend seasoning

3 cloves roasted garlic, smashed, or fresh garlic, diced (here's how I roast and put up my crop)

½ pound pizza crust of your choice (options abound on my Visual Pizza Recipe Index)

1½ cups shredded Italian blend cheese, divided
½ cup goat cheese crumbles

Preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Pour oil in the bottom of a 10 inch cast iron skillet and set aside.  Place sausage on a large sheet of plastic wrap or wax paper (I prefer plastic wrap), fold over to enclose the sausage, and flatten sausage until it is about 10 inches in diameter. You can see a gif of how I do it here. Set aside. Simmer and then strain the tomatoes.

In a medium bowl mix drained tomatoes with honey and seasonings (including garlic), then set aside.

Press the pizza dough into the prepared skillet and up the sides.  It will be thin, and that's just fine.

Spread a cup of shredded cheese across the dough. Unwrap and flip the sausage disc onto the cheese as shown above. Spread the sausage with the prepared sauce. Top with goat cheese and remaining ½ cup shredded cheese. Bake for 30 minutes until crust is browned, cheese is bubbly, and sausage is fully cooked.

Using a couple of spatulas, lift the pizza out of the skillet onto a rack to cool (which prevents steam from making a soggy crust). Congratulate yourself on not eating fried green tomatoes.

This post is shared with Fresh Foods Wednesday and What's Cookin' Wednesday, Tasty Tuesdays, Clever Chicks Blog Hop, Motivation Mondays