Honeymoon Pizza

You will love this pizza.  My mouth waters just thinking about it…  And the story behind it is just about as good!

As you may have guessed, this pizza was inspired by a meal my husband and I enjoyed on our honeymoon.  We stayed in Victoria, British Columbia for 10 beautiful days.  The weather was amazing, the sights were breathtaking… it was an excellent choice for one whose skin tone does not appreciate sandy beaches.

We rented this apartment in the top floor of a carriage house.  It was walking distance from the harbor and many downtown attractions.  The owner of the house was hosting a wine tasting party during our stay, and invited us to come along.  We thoroughly enjoyed the party and met quite the cast of characters.  In particular was this British woman, who had sampled her share of wine.  She went on and on about food, eventually promising to bake us one of her famous cakes (which she pronounced “keck”), as a wedding gift.   It also happened that her son owned a brewpub downtown.  She insisted we try out his place.

Thus, CANOE is where we ended up the next day for lunch.  We enjoyed a few beers and my husband convinced me to share their “Sweet Chili and Prawn Flatbread”.  I was skeptical… it sounded strange, and I couldn’t imagine how the flavors would blend together.  And I, being from a small town with no restaurants (or stoplights for that matter), had a hard time imagining a pizza without your typical tomato-based sauce.

When the flatbread arrived, I was still unsure.  It was topped with curly endive and didn’t look like anything I had eaten before.  But then… I tasted it…  and I was in orbit!  I wanted to finish the flatbread myself, and did not feel like sharing with my new husband.  We hungrily finished the flatbread, and I vowed that I would do my best to recreate this curiosity at home.

It took me the first year-and-a-half of our marriage to get the ingredient quantities just right.  This is my (twentieth?) incarnation of that flatbread… My husband agrees that this tastes the closest to that flatbread, if not better!  I hope you savor it as much as we do.

Come to think of it, that lady never did bake us a “keck” like she promised.  I’m still curious to this day exactly what this famous “keck” of hers entailed.  Anyway, back to the “Honeymoon Pizza”…

You will need:

A thin pizza crust, about 14” in diameter.  I recommend a homemade crust for this one.

3 slices of thick cut bacon.  Use a nice, smoky bacon.

A half-pound of uncooked, peeled, and deveined shrimp.

A small handful of fresh cilantro (do not use dried!).

Shredded mozzarella and provolone cheese.

Sweet chili sauce.  I like Mae Ploy brand best… not too sweet, not too hot.  Just right!

Gather all of your ingredients around before you get started.  You’ll want to cook the bacon first.  Cook it until it is almost done.  It will finish cooking slightly in the oven.  If you crisp up the bacon on the stove, it will be burnt on the pizza.  Trust me… you want your bacon to be a little underdone.

Chop up the shrimp into uniform, bite-sized pieces.  They should be about dime- or nickel-sized.  Since we’re not precooking the shrimp, they need to be small enough to cook in the oven in the time it takes the cheese to melt, but big enough so that you can taste them!

Give the cilantro a rough chop, too.

And if you don’t have provolone to shred, or didn’t purchase shredded provolone, no worries.  Use two slices of provolone and slice them into little strings like I did.  They’ll melt just as wonderfully.

Pre-bake the pizza crust if necessary.  Top with sweet chili sauce, and spread it around with a spoon or a brush.

Top with bacon, cilantro, shrimp, and cheeses.  I usually layer in that order.  This is NOT the time to go overboard with toppings.

Bake according to the crust’s recipe.  Alternatively, if you’re unsure of what the crust requires, bake the pizza at your oven’s highest temperature for about 8 to 10 minutes.  Check on it around 5 or so to see how things are going.  Remove it from the oven when the cheese is bubbly and golden brown and the shrimp has cooked.

Slice it into 8 pieces, and try not to eat all of them by yourself.