Cuban Pizza Recipe

Behold the Cuban pizza: all the fixin's of the best sandwich in the world, The Cuban, all layered onto the most wonderful grandma pizza dough and baked to crispy, cheesy perfection!

Course Bread and Rolls Recipes

Cuisine Italian-American-Cuban

Prep Time 20

Cook Time 25

Rise Time 2

Total Time 2 45

Servings slices

Calories 335kcal

Author Jennifer Field

Equipment

Ingredients

¼ cup olive oil
32 oz pizza dough grandma pizza dough is my favorite link in Notes section
¾ cup mustard
2 Tablespoons minced garlic
8 slices Swiss cheese
8 slices deli ham
1-1 ½ cups pulled pork mojo pork preferred, but any will do nicely
¾ cup pickle chips dill or sweet
8 oz mozzarella cheese shredded
cumin and oregano for sprinkling

Instructions

Set a rack in the lowest position in your oven and preheat to 450F (425 if you have convection).
Prepare a half sheet pan by lining it with parchment and spreading it with olive oil.
Dimple or stretch your dough to fit a parchment-lined half sheet pan.
Allow the grandma pizza dough to rise for approximately 2 hours.
Carefully spread and layer the ingredients on evenly in this order: the garlic, mustard (or mix the garlic and mustard together before spreading), Swiss, ham, pulled pork, pickle chips, mozzarella cheese. NOTE: sprinkle the whole pizza evenly with cumin and oregano at whatever point/s you'd like. I added some after I added the mustard, after the pickles, and then again once it came out of the oven.
Bake the pizza for 15 minutes, then rotate the pan.
Bake an additional 7-10 minutes. The pizza is done when the bottom of the crust is golden brown on the bottom, deeply golden brown-to-brown around the edges, and the cheese is all melted with some broiled spots.
Remove from the oven, loosen the eges of the pizza with a spatula, and slide the pie onto a cooling rack.
Let cool for 5 minutes.
Zigzag with mustard or even with reduced pork marinade if you like. Or skip that step.
Move the pizza to a cutting board,* and slice with a sharp knife or a pizza wheel.
Slice and enjoy.

Video

Notes

Here's the Grandma Pizza Dough Recipe
Here's Roy Choi's Mojo Pork Recipe

Tips for Making the Best Cuban Pizza

Use the best crust possible. For me, that generally means homemade, but you can also use fresh dough you buy from a local pizza place or from the deli section at the grocery store
Don't overload the pizza: you want to make sure that you get most of the ingredients in every bite and all of them on every slice, but if you completely blanket the dough in a ton of toppings, it will take forever to bake.
It's your pizza: If your favorite part of a Cuban sandwich is the mustard, make sure you use a very sharp mustard. If your favorite part is the pickles, use more pickles. It's your pizza, so use the most of whatever you want the predominant flavor to be.
Bake the pizza on the lowest shelf of your oven, because that's where the heat comes from. The intense heat towards the bottom of your oven will help brown the crust.
Watch your oven temperature. If you make a grandma pizza like I did, bake at a lower temperature to make sure it cooks through. If using a thin crust (even if you just end up stretching the grandma dough out thin) bake at the highest temperature your oven will reach.

*If you move the pizza straight to a cutting board from the oven and then let it cool, the bottom crust will lose its crispness, so allow it to cool on a rack for a few minutes before moving to a board then cutting it immediately and serving it.

Nutrition