Pizza Del Re

Let me tell you a story about the best pizza I've ever eaten. I was walking down a little street in Pittsburgh with a friend, about 2 years ago, and saw a new place opening - Mercurio's. This little restaurant serves 30+ flavors of homemade gelato, and rotates their daily selection among over 100 flavors. My favorites so far? Dark chocolate stracciatella, raspberry and truffles, dulce de leche, nutella and pumpkin spice. Okay, fine, I love them all.

So what does this have to do with pizza you ask? Well, I love the gelato at Mercurio's and thought it couldn't possibly get better. But it could, and it did. A few weeks later I walked by Mercurio's and they were now a full-blown restaurant - gelato was just the beginning while their stone oven was being delivered and installed. And, as if you couldn't guess, their pizza is something out of this world.


The first thing I love about their pizzas? They're the perfect size. You can split one with a friend and have just enough room left for gelato. My second favorite thing? They're made with fresh, delicious ingredients and each pizza is a work of art. And while the menu at Mercurio's menu isn't long, they only need one thing on it to keep me happy - pizza del re. Mercurio's describes this as a pizza with "house made mozzarella, truffle spread, mushrooms, Proscuitto di Parma, extra virgin olive oil."

Every time I go within a 30 mile radius of Mercurio's, I want to go get pizza del re. And if I'm not eating it, I'm talking about how delicious it is.While all the ingredients are so good (house made mozzarella, mushrooms, Prosciutto), the ingredient that ties is all together is truffle oil. I can't explain exactly what it is about truffle oil that is so intoxicatingly good, but you'll just have to trust me and try it.


Then it dawned on me the other day - why do I need to torture myself waiting for pizza del re when I can just make it myself?! So off to the grocery store I went to collect all my ingredients. Have you ever tried to recreate something amazing that you ate a restaurant? And it didn't quite live up to the original? This is not one of those time. Not to brag, but my pizza was spot on and delicious. When my boyfriend realized when I was making, he was overwhelmed with excitement (he also has a love affair with this pizza).


And as if recreating the most amazing pizza in my own kitchen wasn't excitement enough, I also have a bottle of truffle oil I will now be adding to everything - because it can only make things better. Two things I do recommend, a pizza peel and a pizza stone. These aren't absolutely necessary to make a perfect pizza, but they do help. The pizza stone helps get your pizza nice and crispy and cooked perfectly (because we can't all have stone ovens to cook pizzas). And while your stone is heating up in the oven, the peel will help move your pizza from your counter to the oven (you might thing this is easy, but I have a disastrous story to convince you otherwise - I'll save that story for another day).

Pizza Del Re

Yields: 14-inch pizza | Prep time: 10 minutes | Total time: 30 minutes

Ingredients:

• Pizza dough

• 2-3 Tbsp. White truffle oil

• 8 oz. mushroom, sliced into 1/4-inch slices (I used baby portobellos)

• 2 oz. Proscuitto, very thinly sliced

• 12 oz. fresh mozzarella, cut into 1/2-inch disks