How to create a homemade clam chowder pizza and amaze your friends without feeling like a chowder head.

“The potatoes are so, so creamy!” Not the first thing you expect to hear about a pizza? Stick with me, and you’ll hear all kinds of things about pizza you didn’t expect.
 
And the first thing is: you can feel good about putting clam chowder on a homemade pizza.
 
Really.
 
Are you one of those people who’s glancing at me sideways now? I recommend letting the scales fall from your eyes along with the clam shells and any other rigid protective coverings worn by sea creatures in an effort to stave off predation by a threatening beast like, oh, me.
 
As you know, a lot of people out there enjoy living by a credo of “That’s not pizza.” And a simple fact is that yes, clams on pizza is genuinely a thing, both here and abroad.
 
(If you already know this, just bear with me. You might find out about a different pizza you’ll also want to try, though leftover soup will not be involved.)

I recently said to someone, “I could make a New Haven white clam pizza.” The words flew from her mouth in retort: “That’s disgusting.”
 
It was so fierce and committed, you’d think I’d been espousing the joys of cannibalism or rat tart.  And this is someone who’s very, very foodie, having literally eaten cuisines around the world, from Boston to Bangkok. 
 
Point of fact: The New Haven white clam pizza is legendary.
 
It was popularized by the epic Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletana on Wooster Street. Many other New Haven pizzas have followed suit with their own versions.
 
If you’re a pizza purist who believes Naples can do no wrong, look no further than the classic pizza frutti di mare. It’s a very famous pizza Napoletana. It’s sauced with San Marzano tomatoes and adorned with clams, along with mussels, prawns and squid.
 
Also, when I lived in the South of France for about five minutes, it seemed like every pizzeria had some kind of similar, “fisherman’s pizza” on the menu. (Trigger warning: that’s where I also learned the thrill of runny-yolk egg on a pizza. Maybe we’ll write about that next, see how many race to unsubscribe from our list.)
 
So, clam chowder on pizza is a kind of cousin to the New Haven white clam pizza. And while this is something that I imagined out of my own pizza-fevered brain, I’m not the first. I can claim only that this pizza is not influenced by anyone else’s pizza. I did not Google, “How to make a clam chowder pizza.”
 
But if you do, you’ll find over 11 million results. Though not all of them are recipes. Some are things like, “Hey, did you ever think about eating a pizza along with a cup of clam chowder?” (Google’s gastronomic enlightenment factor runs rampant.)
 
SIDEBAR: This chowder-pizza process is viable for many other kinds of soups. I’ve done it with turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy (not that I recommend it), étouffée (which made my wife declare, “I’ve wasted my life!”), and gumbo.
 
I thought maybe I was being some kind of knucklehead rebel with soups and gravies on pizza. Lo, to my bewilderment and flabbergast, when I read the 32-pound Modernist Pizza, I discovered that they discuss soups as pizza sauce and offer all kinds of suggestions.

Bowl of homemade Rhode Island clam chowder, the "clear" choice. (Ha! That means no dairy or tomatoes.) 

That’s because soup is, after all, an emulsion.
 
“A what?” you ask. The technical definition of emulsion is “a fine dispersion of minute droplets of one liquid in another in which it is not soluble or miscible.” (Thank you, oh kind Oxford Dictionary.) You may not find any miscibility in that definition. So the easy definition is: “You know, like a vinaigrette, or something made with a roux.”
 
The first steps to any pizza are always the same: heating the oven and liberating the dough ball from the confines of the refrigerator.
 
So this time, as always, that happened first. (If you’re new to this, once your oven reaches temperature, your steel or stone should heat in there for an hour. That intense stored heat is what allows for “oven spring,” or the “pop” that occurs in a pizza dough when it meets the hot thermal mass.)

​I also retrieved the leftover clam chowder, and separated the solids from the liquid using a slotted spoon. I’d be heating the soup for thickening it, so it was less runny and more emulsified. And the potatoes and clams and bacon did not require any further cooking. I may be oversensitive on this count, but I’m always concerned about overcooking seafood. (Overcooked shrimp? Gak.)
 
Also, there were more potatoes in the chowder than I wanted on the pizza. So I separated out most of those for application independent of the proteins and other veggies (i.e., onions and celery).
 
Putting the soup into a saucepan and over a fire, I added a slurry made with flour and a bit more of the soup, whisking it over a flame until thickened.
 
Putting aside the chowder components, I grated some Parmesan, and waited for the oven to heat and the dough to warm up.

Stretching a 176-gram dough ball to 10 inches diameter, I spread the thickened soup onto the pizza.
 
That was followed by sprinkling a small fistful of grated Parmesan.
 
Next came the chowder solids placed strategically around the pie (I’m a big fan of a well-composed pizza), followed by a few additional potatoes here and there, and went to launch--
 
Only to discover that I’d accidentally switched on the oven in convection mode.
 
Duh.
 
That means it doesn’t heat the steel as directly, and it doesn’t get as hot.
 
Stupidity happens. Accidents, too. And I wasn’t going to wait around for the oven to heat properly while my pizza sat there, becoming one with the peel in an intense desire to become a calzone.
 
The steel was about 550 degrees (in this oven, it typically gets to 619) so, I switched the broiler on high and launched the pizza. It would work. Not ideal, but also not much different than the pizza made fourth or fifth in line during a pizza party.
 
SIDEBAR: I usually aim for a browned cornicione (the rim of the crust) and a little bit of char. Some folks find this troubling, which baffles me. Blind taste tests often demonstrate that the preferred pizzas are the crispiest ones—even when the taste test has nothing to do with crispness. The great J. Kenji Lopez-Alt found this in his Serious Eats story about the apocrypha of  New York water and pizza. He performed double-blind taste tests to see whether pizza eaters could discern between pizzas made with New York City water or any other water. (They couldn’t. But the winning pizzas also happened to be the crispiest.)

​Anyway, in my oven, the baking time on this pie at 550 degrees is about 6 minutes. Your mileage may vary.
 
I’ve made this pizza a couple of times. But my primary pizza taster (the Fabulous Honey Parker) has never had it. So I unleashed it upon her. Her first comment?
 
“Oh, my God. The potatoes are so, so creamy!” And, of course, bacon is involved. How do you not love that? The newly christened Chowder Head Pizza is a win, and will go into the regular lineup whenever there happens to be leftover chowder at hand.
 
FOOTNOTE ON THE CHOWDER: Make this with any kind of clam chowder you want—even the much maligned Manhattan clam chowder. (It’s red, ya know. Tomatoes. That’s enough for some miscreants to indulge in fisticuffs. But I’ve made red clam pizzas in New England when fresh or high-quality frozen clams are plentiful. It's always a winner.) I’ve used New England clam chowder, which contains milk. But this most recent pizza was made with my new favorite chowder style, Rhode Island clam chowder. It’s a “clear” chowder in that it’s made with seafood stock and clam juice but no dairy. I like the simplicity of it and the way that it highlights the ingredients more.

CHOWDER HEAD TRIVIA: Ever wonder where the expression “You chowder head” comes from?
 
In the good old days, before synthetic-foam kitchen sponges, affordable, mass-produced automobiles, and widely available polio vaccine, houses in coastal New England were built with a room off the kitchen that was not heated.
 
In winter, they’d make a big pot of clam chowder and place it in that room. Before shutting the door, they’d put a length of rope into the chowder.
 
When the chowder froze, they’d grab the rope, pull the frozen chowder out of the pot, and tie the rope to a beam.
 
The big lump of chowder would hang there in the cold, and they’d chip off chunks of chowder into a pot, and take it inside to heat it up.
 
Over time, with the repeated chipping away at the chowder lump, its shape began to resemble a human head.
 
That became known as the chowder head. Everybody had ‘em.
 
And why is it called “chowder”? The word may come from chaudron, the French word for cauldron, or the similar Creole word, chodier; or possibly the French word chaudrée, which is a thick fish soup from a southwestern coastal region of France; or it might come from the Quebecois French word chaudière, meaning “bucket.” Whee!
 
So much pointless trivia for making a pizza!

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Regardless of whether you are a chowder-free zone, if you’re thinking about starting your pizzamaking journey, one good place to do so is inside Free The Pizza. Really, it’s A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have. It’s a manual that takes you from zero to pizza with a few laughs along the way. Also, if you buy a hard copy, I'll send you an autographed book plate if you contact me here. If you buy the Kindle edition, know that there are printable cheat sheets on this website so you can take them into the kitchen and spill red sauce all over them.