Edward Schneider

When making pizza at home, I’ve taken to dividing the dough in half and making two smaller pies with different toppings, one with tomato and one without. Usually, the one without is just drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with coarse salt and an herb like rosemary. It comes out cracker-crisp in the middle, with great big bubbles and a nice rim of puffier crust at the perimeter. It tastes like focaccia; because of its crispness, however, it eats like pizza. My wife, Jackie, and I generally wolf it down in the kitchen while waiting upon the tomato/mozzarella/whatever pizza, which takes longer to bake.

The last time I made pizzas I had half a cup or so of leftover mixed olives in the fridge, and Jackie thought they should end up on a pizza. I pitted them, chopped them medium-fine and added thyme, parsley and a small Thai chili, all minced, grated pecorino and lots of olive oil.

I stretched out the dough, smeared it with this rough olive pesto and baked it on a stone in our oven; it was heated to its wimpy 500-degree maximum, for around eight minutes. The abundant oil in the mixture prevented the chopped olives from burning or drying out, and the finished product was very aromatic and flavorful, not surprising given the ingredients. Not having been weighed down with lots of toppings, the oil-gilded crust was amazingly light. A lovely thing: we ate it all, while half of a perfectly good tomato-mozzarella pie remained untouched.

This could be made with other fresh herbs (rosemary and sage come to mind) and ingredients like anchovies or good-quality sun-dried tomatoes could also find their way into the olive pesto. And with this type of topping, there’s no reason you couldn’t use a thicker, airier base, like the excellent focaccia dough that Fred Plotkin describes in his Ligurian cookbook “Recipes from Paradise.” Secondhand copies are to be found online — and, presumably, off line, too.