Roasted Garlic & Pesto Pizza with Deep Fried Crust

"In Naples, Italy, pizza fritta is an ubiquitous street food. Pizza fritta translates directly to “fried pizza,” so its popularity isn’t hard to understand. Pizza = delicious. Fried food = delicious. Fried pizza? Doubly delicious! It comes in many forms in the streets of Naples, and, now, in the frozen aisles of your local Trader Joe’s, it comes in the form of Trader Joe’s Roasted Garlic & Pesto Pizza with Deep Fried Crust.

Our Roasted Garlic & Pesto Pizza is made for us authentically in Naples, where our supplier takes great care in replicating the lengthy, artisanal process of this particular pizza-making method. The dough is matured for 90 hours, then fermented for 6 additional hours, and while its fermenting, they manually fold the dough three times a day. Once the dough reaches peak readiness, our supplier shapes it by hand and deep fries it in sunflower seed oil for a quick three minutes. The result is a crust that is at once perfectly crunchy and dreamily airy, chewy, and pillowy.

The toppings are just as key as the crust, and we didn’t skimp there, either—our Product Developer based the recipe on one of the best pizzas she’s ever had, which came from a teeny-tiny little pizzeria in Bari, Italy. Accordingly, we top each Deep Fried Crust with mozzarella, provolone, Parmigiano Reggiano, and—most importantly—dollops of burrata and fresh pesto with roasted garlic."