The Marinara Swap Cheese Lovers Need For The Perfect Pizza Night
Making pizza at home is fun, easy, and sometimes more cost-effective than paying those hefty delivery fees. Making delicious, homemade pizza (especially when it takes like you used a pizza oven) is a great activity for bonding with friends or family, and you can customize your order any way you want, whether it's with your favorite toppings or a unique sauce. If you're all about the cheese, then you might want to try ditching the classic three-ingredient red pizza sauce for something a little more interesting: a cheese-based sauce like queso or Alfredo.
Queso might be most commonly served with chips, but what's stopping you from pairing it with crispy pizza dough? This rings especially true if the toppings reflect complementary flavors. If you're not interested in the spice from queso, you can create an all-cheese pie using basic Alfredo sauce or get even more creative with a homemade beer cheese. Start with the sauce, then build the toppings around it to make sure everything goes together nicely.
Add cheese sauce to your next homemade pizza
The sauce is the underlying flavor of the whole pizza; it's in every bite, so it has to work with every topping. Queso, for example, is the perfect base for a taco-style pie. You can pile some seasoned beef for a filling slice, and enhance it with other taco toppings like onions, pickled jalapeños, or a cilantro garnish. For a milder pizza with rich flavor, Alfredo sauce is a must. Additional cheeses, like Parmesan and fontina, will pair well with this sauce, since they are often included when making it. You can leave it as a white pie or add anything from bright spinach and parsley to earthy sautéed mushrooms.
Beer cheese dip — which has origins in Kentucky — might be the most unique option here. Sure, it's known to pair well with pretzels, but who says it can't be the base for a pizza? Pickled jalapeños would work well as a topping here too, and you can stick with more basic cheeses like cheddar and Monterey Jack — for extra creativity and a pizza that will keep your guests talking, use pretzel dough in place of classic pizza crust.