Need a new pizza in your lineup? Meet the flavors you didn't know you were missing: mortadella and pistachios.

​It’s frustrating when a foodie food trend makes me look like some kind of Gianni Come Lately trying to influence my homemade pizza friends into doing silly things. And by some measures, mortadella is silly. It’s Oscar Mayer bologna dotted with inexplicable white chunks, right? Who would ever think about putting it on a pizza?
 
The truth: mortadella is a high-end Italian delicacy. And in some ways, imported mortadella is the Absinthe of charcuterie: banned from US import for no good reason beyond a lame excuse. There was an outbreak of African swine fever in Italy in 1967. It took almost 40 years for mortadella import normalcy to return. And now, there’s a mortadella renaissance happening in the US, fueled by celebrity chefdom.
 
But that’s not my deal. I’m talking mortadella because it’s a good idea that you might want to try, too. Mortadella is really tasty on pizza.
​

According to the Los Angeles Times, one celebrity chef in Los Angeles calls mortadella “The tinned fish of charcuterie.”
 
And since my penchant for celebrating tinned anchovies is well known (and also gets me booed in social media by my own mother), why wouldn’t I be going down this mortadella hole?
 
I recently made a pizza with pistachios and mortadella two ways. I’m also going to show it to you because it was a crowd pleaser. In the words of the Fabulous Honey Parker, “I liked this waaaaaay more than I expected to.”
 
Or wanted to, frankly. I mean…mortadella, right?

ABOVE: Slices of a small, whole mortadella acquired from an Italian specialty market in New Jersey. (Where else, really?)


​You might look at mortadella as reminiscent of bologna. That’s because it is bologna. The original bologna. And mortadella originates in Italy in (surprise!) Bologna.
 
But comparing American supermarket packaged bologna to Italian bologna (or even to American bologna made by people who care) is hard to do. The supermarket plastic packaged product is merely a faint echo of the real deal.
 
Mortadella is also as old as a known food style can be. Mortadella nourished Etruscans in the BC years even before Rome was making empire-building fashionable.
 
In its most pure form, mortadella is a finely ground cooked pork sausage originally made using a mortar and pestle. (Yay, etymology!) The resulting fine pork is blended with chunks of the highly prized fat that comes from a pig’s neck, and is spiced with myrtle, garlic and pepper.
 
From that original delicacy, there are more than a dozen different variations of mortadella across Italy. In the US, we commonly see mortadella containing black peppercorns or pistachios. (Some purists are apparently angered by the pistachios as if it were pineapple on a pizza in New York. So it goes.)
 
 
Mortadella is also found around the world, from São Paolo to Poland, from Russia to Vietnam.
 
It kinda makes you wonder what we’ve been missing out on around these parts. We’re getting schooled in mortadella just in time for tariff season!

My involvement with this cased-meat sensation began as an experiment while on a recent road trip through North Carolina. I was test driving a particular brand of dome oven for the first time, and mortadella and pistachios is a pizza that the dome’s owner likes to make. (It was mentioned here in last week’s post.)
 
So we made that pizza. It was good enough that I just tried it again on Cape Cod with friends who are still willing to let me into their home. It was done in the “proper” two-ways style proposed by my friend in the Carolinas and exhorted by Chef Tuan Tran of Cooking With Chef Tuan fame.
 
Basically, we’re talking a cheese pizza topped with sliced mortadella baked until done. Then, it comes from the oven and additional mortadella is applied to the hot pizza, along with chopped pistachios.
 
 
Lemme tell ya, this is a fun pizza.
 
I also had fun making it by using some ingredients acquired while on the road to Cape Cod.
 
We were in New Jersey trying a friend’s favorite Trenton tomato pie at world-famous DeLorenzo’s. We spotted an Italian deli nearby, popped inside, and acquired an entire mortadella in miniature. (They’re often the size of a SWAT-team battering ram. It’s crazy.)
 
Then, in Asbury Park, I acquired some house-made mozzarella that was so fresh, it was still warm from being made.

​ABOVE: The counter girl at Antonio's Gourmet in Wanamassa, New Jersey holding up the so, so fresh house-made mozzarella. It was fresh enough that the cheese in the package was still warm. (Wanamassa is Asbury Park adjacent. They also have another shop in Staten Island.)


The pistachios were a standard supermarket product because that’s all we can get around these parts. I chopped them coarsely with a chef's knife, then put them aside for post-bake garnish.
 

Next, I sliced the mortadella two ways. Since they’d be baking on the pie for about 6 minutes, my slices were what might be considered standard over-the-counter cold-cut thickness.
 
Next, I sliced more of the meat as thin as possible using a very sharp santoku knife. I’ve found that when you put an especially thin slice of meat (like prosciutto) onto a very hot pizza, the meat almost “melts” onto the surface. It changes the entire experience of eating it. It becomes luscious. 
 

Since this pizza is an exercise in contrasts, I wanted to make both instances of the mortadella as delightful as possible--the ever so slightly curled and charred mortadella mingling with the fresh, melty room-temp mortadella.
 
And, of course, letting them both take on the brash interloper of the nutty, earthy, salty and crunchy pistachios.
 
So, that’s what I did.
 
And that’s what they ate.

ABOVE: An angle on the pizza after it was dressed for serving. Notice the darker colored mortadella that baked on the pizza. (The color is a bit on the reddish side. That seems to be a byproduct of photography with a Samsung S-series phone when the scene is lit by a range hood. No amount of post-shoot processing seems to correct it. We will use our imaginations to envision less red.) 


And after it was served, there was very little sound in that room outside of the eating of Pizza Mortadella In Due Modi Con Pistacchi. (I have no idea if that’s how the Italians would really say it, but it sounds pretty good to me.)
 
If you’re willing to go down the road to mortadella, I heartily encourage this pizza. It’s not big and bold the way so many of my pizzas are. This one is subtle and sexy.
 
Or, as The Fabulous Honey Parker would say, “There’s something about the texture. It’s not like pepperoni. There’s this mellowness to the flavor that’s really satisfying and inviting. It’s just correct.”

​ABOVE: Overhead shot of the same pizza. Notice the contrast between the mortadella from the oven and mortadella added post-bake.


And if the fanatics hate us for the pistachios, so be it.
 
Maybe I’ll try adding pineapple to complete the insult. Mangia!
 
 
Pizza Mortadella Two-Ways How-To
 
This isn’t exactly a recipe as much as it’s a process.

 
INGREDIENTS
 
- Have your dough ball, your sauce and your cheeses for your standard cheese pizza. (I used fresh mozzarella and pecorino Romano and made a 15-inch pizza.)
 
- Enough small slices of mortadella to cover the pizza comfortably
 
- Enough small slices of very, very thin mortadella to cover the pizza comfortably
 
- A generous handful of roasted and salted pistachios, chopped
 
 
STEPS
 
Assemble the cheese pizza as you would normally
 
Next, place the thicker slices of mortadella uniformly around the pizza.
 
On a pre-heated pizza steel in the top third of the oven (at least 8 inches below the broiler), bake the pizza using the broiler method, rotating it at 3 minutes, and removing it at 6 to 8 minutes. The crust should be browned and adequately charred without being burnt.
 
Place the pizza on a cooling rack.

Scatter the thinner slices of unbaked mortadella around the pizza, followed by the pistachios.
 
Allow to set a moment, then slice, serve, eat and enjoy!
 
Free the pizza!
 
DISCLAIMER: Clearly, no artificial intelligence is at work in this slice of pizza prose. All intelligence or lack thereof is proprietary.
 
-----
 
A lot of big-time professional artisan pizza makers once made their first pizza in a home oven just like yours. You can do it, too. My weird little award-winning book is one way to make it so. The book is about how to get from zero to pizza using the oven you already have. Besides learning to make great pizza, there’s not much else you can do with it. In fact, you can’t even use it to level a table leg if you buy the Kindle edition (which is less expensive than the print editions and has links to instructional videos and printable kitchen worksheets). To learn more about Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have, click here. ​