Grilled vegetables on pizza — the topping
Vegetable pizza fails one way and succeeds one way, and they're the same way: water. Pile raw zucchini, eggplant and peppers on a pie and they steam, weep and leave a soggy mess; grill or roast them dry first and they arrive sweet, smoky and already cooked — toppings instead of a problem.
The ortolana — the greengrocer's pizza — carries all three here, each weighed per pizza. This page is the one rule that makes vegetable pizza work, variety by variety, with the doses read from the same registry the recipe page scales.
What to buy
Zucchini: small and firm with tight skin — big ones go seedy and watery. Eggplant: heavy for its size with a fresh green cap; lighter ones are spongier and more bitter. Peppers: red and yellow are sweeter and prettier than green, which stays grassy — buy them firm and glossy with no wrinkles.
All three are cheap, in season together in summer, and best bought the day you'll char them — grilled vegetables don't keep their snap. If you're heating the grill or a tray anyway, do extra: they keep a few days under oil in the fridge and turn any white pizza into an ortolana.
Working with it
Each vegetable wants its own treatment first, all aimed at driving the water out. The zucchini goes on sliced thin lengthwise, grilled or roasted dry first, so it takes char and loses its squeak. The eggplant is salted, pressed and grilled before it goes on — the salt pulls the bitter water, the press squeezes it, the grill finishes it. The peppers are roasted, peeled and cut into strips, sweet and silky once the skin is gone.
Then the shared rule: dry, and not crowded. Grilled vegetables still carry some moisture, so blot them and lay them on the cheese with daylight between — a heap sweats itself back to soggy even after all that work. The oven only warms them through and marries them to the cheese; the cooking already happened on the grill.
On the pizzas
The classics that use it, with the amount each takes at its default size — the same numbers their recipe pages scale to your dough:
| Pizza | As | Per pizza | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ortolana | Zucchini | 80 g | before the bake |
| Ortolana | Eggplant | 80 g | before the bake |
| Ortolana | Bell peppers | 80 g | before the bake |
Questions from the counter
Why grill the vegetables first — can't I just use them raw?
Raw zucchini, eggplant and peppers are full of water, and a pizza is the worst place to release it: you flood the cheese and steam the crust limp. Grilling or roasting dry first drives the water off, concentrates the sweetness and chars in a flavor the oven can't add in a few minutes. The pie just warms them through — the real cooking is done before they land.
Do they each need different prep?
Yes, and it's worth it. Eggplant gets salted and pressed first (it's the bitter, spongy one); zucchini just wants thin slicing and a hot grill; peppers want roasting and peeling so the skin doesn't go leathery. Once they're all charred and cooled they're equals on the pizza — the doses above weigh each one for the ortolana.
What other vegetables work this way?
Anything you cook the water out of first: red onion, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes halved and roasted, artichokes, asparagus tips. Keep the two rules — char or roast dry before topping, and don't crowd the pie — and you can build any garden pizza. Leafy things (rocket, basil) are the exception: those go on raw, after the bake.
Put it on a pizza
The dough is the calculator’s job and the doses are scaled on the recipe pages — this one is ready for any of the classics above.
The clock is a suggestion. The dough is the boss. In bocca al lupo!
Impasto is a free pizza dough calculator for Neapolitan, New York, Roman, Sicilian, Detroit, thin crust and focaccia doughs — flour, water, salt and yeast weighed in baker's percentages, with the fermentation schedule written for you.