Going Green With Pizzas: Best Ingredients to Add in Green Pizzas

While many are inexplicably drawn to meat as a pizza toppings (you really can’t beat a meat lover’s pizza), there are those few - i.e. vegetarians - who prefer to load their pizzas up with every form of vegetable imaginable. Health experts say you should eat something green with every meal, so why not toss some of it on top of your pizza and get the best of both worlds?

Here are the 5 best “green toppings” you can include on your pizza.

Spinach

Whether it’s baby spinach or ripped right off and thrown on top, spinach is one of the best toppings you can put on a pizza for two very important reasons. First and foremost, it’s a great way to get kids to eat their vegetables, as once it’s cooked on the pizza and covered in the delicious grease and oils produced by the baking cheese, you can’t even taste it. Secondly, spinach is one of the best vegetables you can eat, packed with so many vitamins and minerals it’s absolutely ridiculous. It can be buried under the cheese, ripped into small pizzas to make it easier to chew (it’s kind of rubbery when baked on a pizza), and topped with a variety of spices to make it even more suitable for a pizza.



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Green Peppers

One of the best things about green peppers is that they can be used on a pizza in a variety of ways. Frozen pizzas tend to chop them up into small bits, while pizza restaurants such as Pizza Hut use small slices to top their pies. Best of all, they can go with almost every other toppings, adding a crispy and delicious flavor to any style of pizza you can conjure up. One thing I like to do is slice a green pepper so it forms a ring, then fill each ring with other toppings while surrounding the ring with toppings as well. Not only does it look cool, but it tastes delicious.



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Pesto

Not a topping so much as a replacement for marinara sauce, pesto, which is essentially a blend of garlic, basil, and cheese, is a perfect green addition to any pizza, especially if you’re trying to stray away from the unnecessarily added sugar often found in marinara sauce. You can make your own or buy it pre-made, and can add a variety of additional ingredients to customize the flavor. Combine it with a spinach-based pizza crust and some green peppers as a topping and you’ll be swimming in the healthy green goodness. Pesto especially works well with just thick slices of mozzarella topped with a little bit of garlic. It’s a flavor explosion!



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Lettuce

While the idea of using lettuce as a topping might seem weird, you have to consider its versatility. Lettuce is the main ingredient in a salad, which means the addition of lettuce to the top of your pizza can result in a fancy “salad pizza.” Toss in some tomatoes, sliced mushrooms, blue cheese, and drizzle with ranch dressing and you have yourself a relatively healthy pizza that’s not only tasty but easy to make. Simply cook the pizza crust, add whatever base you’d life, then add the cold salad toppings. Both shredded lettuce and leaf lettuce work, though shredded lettuce, which also works for Mexican pizzas, is the easiest way to go about making the pizza, as it’s less of a chore to try and eat.



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Zucchini / Cucumbers

Since these two items are so similar I decided to group them together. A zucchini or cucumber pizza isn’t a very common pizza topping, but that’s what makes it so interesting. As an added bonus, it has more than one application. While it can be sliced and added to the pizza as a standalone topping, you can use larger slices of zucchini and cucumbers as a dough replacement for little mini pizza finger foods. Simply add some cheese and a slice of pepperoni and lightly cook in some olive oil over medium heat. Conversely, you can also eat them cold. They’re incredibly versatile and quite delicious to boot.



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Posted on August 21, 2012 at 9:00 AM