A Chef's Top Tips For Making Seafood Pizza

If your pizza preferences lean toward land animals like pepperoni, aka pizza's BFF, and the majestic sausage, you're leaving a lot of fish in the sea. Literally. And that's not to mention all the potential bivalves, crustaceans, and mollusks that also deserve a spot topping your pies. But just like your more everyday slice, there are some things you need to keep in mind for an ideal outcome. So Chowhound hooked Mike Fadem, chef and owner of Ops Pizza and Wine in New York City, for his tips on how to optimize the catch of the day whether it's fresh, tinned, frozen, or something in between.

Anyone who's tried to stir-fry a shrimp will tell you how quickly it will curl into a circle, the dreaded sign of overdoneness. It will turn dastardly inward after too long in a conventional oven, too. A lot of seafood finishes just as rapidly. So Fadem says not to let it linger. "For home oven baking, I would add the seafood towards the end of the pizza bake," he shares. More specialized equipment that finishes dough faster will perform differently. "If you have a wood-fired oven at home, maybe you can pre-cook the seafood or put it on top for the entire bake."

"Clams are a classic and super flavorful," Mike Fadem says, adding the unfairly maligned "anchovies of course" to the net. One more pantry staple joins those diminutive swimmers as a quintessential Italian pick. "Another traditional Neapolitan thing is to put canned tuna on pizza. This goes well with onions, peppers, tomatoes, etcetera," Fadem says. Back in the refrigerator aisle, smoked salmon is also terrific as a pizza topping,

There is also the age-old debate about whether seafood and cheese (aka pizza's lifelong lover) are truly meant to be. Even our basic cable boyfriend Bobby Flay has vacillated about whether fish goes with cheese sometimes, always, or never, as though shrimp Parm, oysters Rockefeller, all manner of au gratins, and a little diner icon called the tuna melt weren't on the proverbial table. Still, one needn't stick with the expected mozzarella when reeling in their pizza. "I like provolone with seafood," Fadem says.