Easily Upgrade Pizza With A Simple Store-Bought Ingredient: Dill Pickles

For the most part, even the best frozen pizzas stick with classic toppings such as cheese, pepperoni, and sausage, branching out only so far as chicken or vegetables. Some pizza chains, however, have been a bit bolder. Pizza Hut added a pickle pizza to its lineup in 2023, while Papa John's has also brought back its pickle-topped cheeseburger pizza, which originated as a 2015 Papadia. Pickle pizza may not be ready to overtake pepperoni in popularity, but this somewhat unusual topping has gained a cult following in recent years. If you're a pickle fan (or just curious), you needn't order takeout. Recipe developer Annabelle Randles has created a dill pickle pizza recipe you can make at home.

Randles' recipe begins with making a crust from scratch. You can skip this step if you're using store-bought dough or a pre-made crust. However, the toppings are what make this pizza unique. Instead of plopping the pickles atop marinara and mozzarella, Randles opts to make white (and green) pizza instead. Describing the creation, Randles explains, "The dill pickles add a satisfying crunch and a burst of flavor in perfect contrast to the gooey and cheesy garlic white sauce topping."

Once our recipes have been released into the wild, they become collaborative efforts. While a developer may make a dish a certain way, when you're doing the cooking, you're free to make whatever tweaks you see fit. If you'd like extra pickles in your pizza, you can achieve this by giving it a pickle-stuffed crust. You'll need to start with pizza dough, whether scratch-made or store-bought. Form the dough, chop up a few pickles, insert them around the pizza's perimeter, then bake the crust according the instructions.

You could also use jarred Alfredo sauce or even ranch dressing to replace the white sauce, or swap it out for marinara if you prefer red pizza to white. As for the cheese, havarti might not be as melty as mozzarella, but it does pair nicely with dill. (You could always do a combo of the two if you're concerned about cheese pull, but this might not matter if you won't be photographing your food.) Finally, if you want your pickle pizza to look upscale, dice the pickles finely (there's something about sliced ones that screams, "fast food cheeseburger"), then camouflage them with a swirl of sour cream and a few sprigs of fresh dill.