We love making our spicy and healthy pesto every year. We freeze it so we can enjoy it all winter long! It's so fun to try out new recipes and add the pesto to our winter dishes. Plus, it brings back memories of the warm summer months. Yesterday, we decided to get adventurous and make a Spicy Pesto Chicken Pizza. We combined our herbaceous, lemony pesto with chicken, feta cheese, and parmesan cheese on a pizza crust, then baked until all the flavors blended together. It was a huge hit and was the perfect twist on a classic pesto pizza.
Key Takeaways
- The article shares a recipe for Spicy Pesto Chicken Pizza using a healthier pesto made with sunflower seeds and reduced cheese.
- It emphasizes roasting a chicken and utilizing leftovers for multiple meals, including this pizza creation.
- To add flavor while cutting calories, the recipe includes non-fat ricotta cheese and fat-free feta.
- The author highlights the combination of fresh ingredients like mushrooms and Serrano peppers for an extra kick.
- Readers can explore additional recipe options linked within the article for more delicious ideas.
Nice and Spicy!
I love a good tomato-based pizza with pepperoni and some Italian sausage. Still, there isn't much better than a pesto pizza—that fresh basil flavor with the spice from the habanero and then the zesty flavor of lemon. For our healthier pesto, we cut out most of the oil. One of the problems with pesto is all the oil, cheese, and nuts. Yes, we cut the pine nuts and used sunflower seeds instead. (That change was due to a tree nut allergy). We use less cheese than traditional recipes, but we've tested it out and feel like we have the perfect blend of cutting back on cheese but not compromising flavor.
3rd Meal from the Roasted Chicken
How cool is it to roast a chicken? I love the flavor, and it's so simple to make, and all the leftovers you can prepare with the rest of the roasted chicken! The first meal was mashed potatoes and broccoli. I know, not necessarily low in calories, but WOW-IT WAS SO GOOD! The second meal was a Tortilla Chicken Casserole. It's also so delicious, and YES, I ate way too much. Then, our third dish was THIS out-of-this-world, Spicy Pesto Chicken Pizza.
So, with one chicken, we had a roasted chicken and mashed potato dinner, got our Mexican Food fix with the tortilla casserole, AND took pizza night to a new level with pesto! Stay tuned for our fourth dinner...
How we made the Pizza
First, we weighed everything. When trying to get healthier, it's essential to make sure you weigh and measure everything. I have been so bad the last few months about not weighing, counting and tracking everything I'm eating. I'm starting to see the problem on the scale. So this week, I'm back on track, writing everything down and weighing food when cooking. The good news is that we had great meals and stayed on track all week.
The dough
I'm pretty lazy when it comes to making pizza dough, so we bought some that worked great for our Spicy Pesto Chicken Pizza.
We like to add some spice to jazz up the store-bought crust, so we brushed on ½ tbs of olive oil and sprinkled crushed red pepper on the bottom of the pizza. Then we added a little Parmesan cheese on top and baked the crust.
Reducing fat and adding flavor
We came up with an innovative way to reduce the amount of cheese on our pizza while still maintaining a cheesy flavor. For this, we added ½ cup of non-fat ricotta cheese to the pesto, which helped to cut down on over 100 calories while giving it a creamy texture and bringing out the basil and lemon flavors. The ricotta pesto mix was easy to spread on the cooked crust, and since it was so creamy, there was no need to add mozzarella cheese. We opted for fat-free feta cheese instead of regular feta, which saved us about 150 calories. The saltiness of the feta complemented the lemony pesto, resulting in a delicious flavor combination.
The rest of the ingredients
We had so much fun making this yummy pizza. Amy knows how to work magic with mushrooms, and she came up with a delicious recipe that includes a splash of Sherry. We added those amazing mushrooms to our Spicy Pesto Chicken pizza, and it was fantastic! Being us, we wanted a little extra kick, so we sliced up some fresh Serrano peppers to put on top. And to finish it off, we sprinkled on some Parmesan Cheese. It was amazing!
Spicy Pesto Chicken Pizza!!
So, we all know that pizza can be pretty high in calories, right? But if you use a thin crust, reduce the fat content in the cheese, and make your Pesto at home, you can save some serious calories! The homemade spicy Pesto gave it an extra kick of flavor without sacrificing taste. Trust me, it's definitely worth a try!
Let us know what kind of fun changes you have made to recipes to cut the calories and enhance the flavor.
Are you searching for more recipe options? We have a few suggestions that you might enjoy:
Delicious Spicy Pesto Chicken Pizza Recipe to Try Today
A Few Things We Use
Ingredients
- 1 Pound Pizza dough
- 6 Ounces Chicken Cooked
- ½ Tablespoons Olive Oil
- 1 ½ Tablespoon Crushed Red Pepper
- 4 Ounces Fat-Free Feta cheese
- ½ Cup Non Fat Ricotta Cheese
- 1 Ounces Parmesan Cheese Grated
- ¾ Cups Pesto
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Spread olive oil on a baking sheet or pizza stone. Sprinkle on the crushed red pepper
- Spread pizza dough (or place premade pizza crust, like Baboli) on top of the olive oil and red peppers. Sprinkle ½ of the parmesan cheese on the pizza dough/crust and bake according to package instructions.
- Chop the cooked chicken into small chunks.
- Mix ricotta cheese into the pesto.
- Spread the Pesto/Ricotta cheese mixture on the pizza crust.
- Add the cooked chicken to the pizza.
- Add the feta cheese evenly over the pizza.
- Add the remaining parmesan cheese to the pizza. Bake for about 10 minutes. The pizza is done when the cheese has melted, and everything is heated through.
- Slice and Enjoy!!!!!
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