Pizza bread is easily one of my favorite things to make. It’s simple, delicious, and very versatile, making it the perfect quick lunch or late night snack. The best part? All you really need is bread and tomato sauce. Now, every college student should have these two items. Why? There’s so much you can do with bread (sweet sandwiches with nutella, peanut butter, jelly; savory sandiches with ham and cheese, chicken, hot dogs; buttered toast; the list goes on and on), and pasta is one of the easiest things to cook. Assuming you have bread and tomato sauce the recipe for pizza bread is simple:

Gather your ingredients– again, bread and tomato sauce is the bare minimum here.

Toast the bread– you can either pop it in the toaster if you have one at hand, or lightly toast it in a pan over the stove. You can choose to ignore this step if you have no way of toasting the bread, if it’s already pretty hard, or if you’re just super lazy, but I guarantee toasted is better.

Spread the tomato sauce on the bread– don’t be shy about this, get a nice thick layer of tomato sauce on there.

And that’s it. If you’d rather your pizza bread be nice and warm, stick it in the microwave or oven for a few seconds. Of course, pizza bread with nothing but tomato sauce is like pizza with nothing but tomato sauce: a little sad. As such, here are some ideas of other things you can put on pizza bread to make it yummier:

Cheese– feel free to experiment. I’ve had pizza bread with cheddar cheese, mozzarella cheese, and various other types, and they’ve all worked wonderfully.

Some form of meat– I’ve made pizza bread with ham and with sausages thus far. Personally I think sausages are the best, but both taste good.

Herbs/spices– if you’ve got oregano on hand I’d suggest trying that. I usually sprinkle a little garlic and some basil.

Anything you can think of! The things I’ve listed are merely the ones I’ve tried already, but chances are if it’s good on a regular pizza, it’ll be good on pizza bread! A fan of hawaiian pizza? Try adding chunks of pineapple. Love some egg on your pizza? Top your pizza bread with egg.

After you’ve added one or more of the above items, pop it into the microwave or oven for a bit (melts the cheese, warms the meat, and is overall just a good idea). Here are some of my concoctions:

One last note: if you have bread that’s gone a bit stale and is now too hard to eat, I highly recommend trying to make some pizza bread with it (although you can probably skip the toasting step). When you microwave stale/hard bread with tomato sauce, the heated sauce moistens and softens the bread, making it edible and delicious once more.