Hot Italian Sausage & Ricotta Pizza Recipe

Based on the assortment of food in my fridge this week, hot italian sausage and ricotta pizza was the winning recipe. All I needed to grab was the dough and ricotta, so this was both delicious AND kind of frugal. (I’m guilty of spending $40 in the name of cooking one meal because I needed to buy ALL of the ingredients.) Buckle up, grab a glass of Merlot, and keep reading for the recipe!

Hot Italian Sausage and Ricotta Pizza Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 ball of pizza dough
• Shredded mozzarella cheese
• Romano or Parmesan grated cheese
• 1 link of hot Italian sausage
• Pizza sauce (I used Rao’s Roasted Garlic Sauce with RawSpiceBar pizza spices mixed in)
• Part-skim ricotta cheese
• Spices to taste (I used oregano and crushed red pepper flakes)

Note: I eyeball the amounts use – practice makes perfect.

Directions:

1. About 90 min – 2 hours before you plan on making the pizza, put the dough out to rise. I put it in a chip bowl with flour and cover it with a tea towel.
2. Once the dough is about risen and at room temp, you can start prepping the sausage. Cut it in half and squeeze the meat out of the casing into a small frying pan.
3. Cook the sausage, breaking it up into small chunks, until it’s cooked through and browned.
4. Let the sausage sit on a paper towel to soak up some of the grease.
5. Preheat your oven to 500F or as high as it will go. Make sure your pizza stone is in the oven… I’ve forgotten once or twice.
6. Put a sheet of parchment paper on your pizza peel and flour it up.
7. Stretch the dough out so that it covers the peel – I find that 1 ball of dough usually is a little more than I need, so I take the extra dough at the ends and roll it up for a thick end crust.
8. Put olive oil on the pizza crust, especially the edges. This helps your pizza brown up in the oven.
9. Put the pizza sauce on the pizza, followed by the mozzarella cheese. Make sure you put the toppings on all the way to the edges of the pizza.
10. Add the hot italian sausage, some grated cheese, and your spices.
11. Add a couple of dollops of ricotta onto your pizza. You should be ready to cook!
12. Slide the pizza and parchment pizza onto the pizza stone and start a stopwatch or timer to keep track of how long it’s in the oven.
13. At about the 4-5 minute mark, you should be able to slide the parchment paper out from between the pizza and the pizza stone.
14. Let it cook until the crust and cheese starts to brown. My oven claims to go up to 500F but I’m pretty sure it’s actually much lower, and from start to finish, it usually takes about 11 minutes for a pizza to cook.
15. Slide the pizza out, cut it up, and serve with some wine! I liked how my Merlot went with this pizza.