Breakfast Pizza Is The Fun Way To Serve Up Brunch

If the college student version of you thought that pepperoni pizza washed down with a bottle of cherry Coke was a perfectly fine breakfast or brunch, then the adult you will almost certainly enjoy breakfast pizza. For one thing, a breakfast pizza puts everything you love about breakfast and brunch — bacon, cheese-covered eggs, toast — on one triangular, handheld, edible serving platter. Another point in breakfast pizza's favor is that it's a whole lot fresher (and, therefore, tastier) than your day-old pepperoni pie.

Fortunately, taking pizza from dinner to brunch is an easy transition. You just need the right ingredients, plus maybe a change of mindset. As Nicole Bean, owner and operator of Pizaro's Pizza Napoletana in Houston, Texas, exclusively told Chowhound, "If you really want to jazz up a breakfast pizza, I highly recommend trying scrambled eggs with crème fraîche and caviar with bits of hash brown."

In this case, the mindset switch comes from Bean's willingness to combine typical breakfast foods, like scrambled eggs, with classic brunch foods, like caviar and crème fraîche (which is basically a creamier, more sophisticated version of sour cream) in one place. Moreover, the breakfast slant of this meal means that you can experiment with different sauces. While marinara tends to dominate the lunch or dinner pizza, white sauces such as béchamel or Alfredo cheese sauce complement the likes of bacon and eggs, various sausages, and of course, spuds. It's not as though you can't put red sauce on your breakfast pizza; it's just that this type of pie allows you to embrace some unexpected pizza toppings that can take your meal to the next level.

Since brunch is a combination of breakfast and lunch, you can serve both breakfast and lunch foods on the same table — or, for our purposes, the same pizza. On the breakfast side, it's eggs, eggs, and more eggs. Scrambled eggs allow you to cover a wide area of the pie due to how the eggs spread out during cooking. A fried or baked egg, on the other hand, will give you a big burst of flavor when you bite into the yolk. Cracking a couple of eggs over the rest of your toppings will ensure you get that eggy flavor in every bite.

Breakfast meats also get their time in the sun (or, shall we say, sunny side up?). Oven-cooked bacon sitting alongside eggs or potatoes certainly adds the kind of smoky flavor you associate with a pork-laden breakfast. Other meats, like chorizo sausage, sliced or pulled pork, bits of steak, chicken, or smoked salmon or lox, feel equally at home here. Many of these meats taste exceptionally good with cheeses like feta, cheddar, American, or pepper Jack.

Finally, don't forget that the best pizzas often feature an array of veggie offerings, too. Spinach, mushrooms, chopped onions, sliced tomatoes, bell peppers of any color, olives, broccoli, red cabbage, potatoes, and corn (both sweet and white) give a brunch pizza lots of subtle flavors without making the meal too heavy.

While some folks only seem to like breakfast and brunch if the meals have an umami bent, there are others who swoon over the standard continental breakfast. Foods like croissants, sweet rolls, biscuits, jam, butter flavored with honey or cinnamon, and a cornucopia of seasonal fruits dominate these meals.

"You can also add really fun ingredients such as Brie jams, like apricots or figs, that go very well with ingredients such as bacon and honey/syrup," Nicole Bean told Chowhound. Her flavor choices offer breakfast pizza lovers solid ways to combine the sweet ingredients like jams with the umami power of bacon and eggs. More specifically, if you love these foods together, there's no need to shy away from putting them on the same pizza. Under the brunch umbrella, almost anything goes.

Finally, keep in mind that since this is brunch, you can serve a couple of different kinds of pizza. For example, try one with bacon, eggs, cheese, and mushrooms with lots of white sauce or even your homemade white gravy, and then complement the savory pie with a few sweet pizzas. You might even want to make some dessert pizzas. S'mores, raspberry almond, apple crisp, and more count among the sweet pizza flavorings that deserve to make an appearance on your brunch table. And remember, since anything goes for this meal, it's perfectly acceptable to eat dessert (or a dessert pizza) first.