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Looking to amp up your pizza night? This spicy pizza diavola is a fan favorite starring Kalamata olives, spicy peppers, and gooey mozzarella cheese.
Last month, Alex and I hopped on a plane to Italy, Croatia and Spain in search of culinary inspiration. Armed with a notebook, we set about to eat everything we could find. Several pages of notes and a transatlantic flight later, we’re recreating our favorites in our home kitchen so you can taste them, too!
And on this trip, we found spicy pizza diavola. We discovered it in Rome, at a brew pub of all places. A brew pub, in Italy? Yes, and this spicy pizza diavola is ready to spice up your weekly pizza nights.
What is pizza diavola?
So, what is spicy pizza diavola? In Italian, pizza diavola means “deviled” pizza. And in this case, deviled means one thing: spicy. We tasted our first spicy pizza diavola at L’Osteria Birra del Borgo, one of our very favorite restaurants on this visit to Rome. The man behind this restaurant is known as the King of Pizza in Rome, Gabriele Bonci.
Everything Bonci makes quite literally turns to gold, which we’ll write about in a separate post. But on this visit, it was the spicy pizza diavola from his new brew pub that was memorable for all the guests at our table.
How to make spicy pizza diavola
It appears that there is some variation in what constitutes a spicy pizza diavola. Here are a few common denominators we’ve found that match up with our experience of spicy pizza diavola in Rome:
- Spicy chili peppers: Of course, chili peppers on pizza are what give the spicy pizza diavola its name! A fresh red pepper like a Fresno chili pepper or Calabrian chili pepper are what is traditional. (Calabrian chili peppers are used often in Italian cuisine and are our absolute favorite—we grow them in our garden and you can also find them canned by Dellalo.)
- Spicy sausage: The spicy pizza diavola we had in Rome had spicy sausage as a topping, and a few other online resources use sausage as a typical Diavola pizza ingredient. For this recipe, we left it off to make it vegetarian. Of course, you could absolutely add it back to this one if you’re serving meat lovers!
- Black olives: Olives seem to be optional, but the pizza we had in Rome had black olives so we’ve added them here. They add just the right amount of saltiness to the pizza—especially since our version is vegetarian.
- Margherita pizza base: We’ve seen spicy pizza diavola described as a margherita pizza with spicy peppers and sausage added. Here we’ve used our Perfect Neapolitan Pizza recipe as a base.
Related: Homemade Pizza for Beginners | What’s the Best Pizza Stone?
Do I need Neapolitan pizza oven?
So, do you need a pizza oven to make this spicy pizza diavola? Not at all! However, if you want those lovely char marks on the crust as we have in these photos, you’ll need a pizza oven. A pizza oven can get much hotter than a regular oven. While your standard oven tops out at 550 degrees F, a pizza oven can get up to almost 1000 degrees F!
As I mentioned in our last pizza post, we did not own a pizza oven until recently. But we have been cooking with a new pizza oven for just under a year called the Ooni pizza oven. Powered by wood pellets, the Ooni heats to 1000 degrees Fahretheit in just 10 minutes! It takes a bit of practice, but it’s revolutionized our homemade pizza. Here’s the Ooni pizza oven that we use!
Dietary notes
This recipe is this spicy pizza diavola is vegetarian, refined sugar free, and naturally sweet.
Spicy Pizza Diavola
Looking to amp up your pizza night? This spicy pizza diavola is a fan favorite, starring Kalamata olives, spicy peppers, and gooey mozzarella cheese.
- Prep Time: 1 hour
- Cook Time: 10 minutes
- Total Time: 1 hour 10 minutes
- Yield: 6 slices 1x
- Category: Main Dish
- Method: Baked
- Cuisine: Italian
Ingredients
- 1 ball Best Pizza Dough (or Food Processor Dough or Thin Crust Dough)
- ⅓ cup Homemade Easy Pizza Sauce
- 4 ounces fresh mozzarella cheese (or about ¾ cup shredded mozzarella
- Kosher salt (optional)
- 8 to 10 Kalamata olives
- 1 Fresno or Calabrian chili pepper
- 2 basil leaves
- Semolina flour or cornmeal, for dusting the pizza peel
Instructions
- Follow the Best Pizza Dough recipe to prepare the dough. (This takes about 15 minutes to make and 45 minutes to rest.)
- Place a pizza stone in the oven and preheat to 500°F. OR preheat your pizza oven (here’s the pizza oven we use).
- Prepare the Easy Pizza Sauce.
- Slice the mozzarella into ¼ inch thick pieces. If it’s incredibly watery fresh mozzarella (all brands vary), you may want to let it sit on a paper towel to remove moisture for about 15 minutes then dab the mozzarella with the paper towel to remove any additional moisture.
- Slice the olives in half. Thinly slice the chili pepper (keep the seeds).
- When the oven is ready, dust a pizza peel with cornmeal or semolina flour. (If you don’t have a pizza peel, you can use a rimless baking sheet or the back of a rimmed baking sheet. But a pizza peel is well worth the investment!) Stretch the dough into a circle; see How to Stretch Pizza Dough for instructions. Then gently place the dough onto the pizza peel.
- Use the back of a spoon to spread a thin layer of pizza sauce across the dough. Top with mozzarella cheese, saving out a small bite for tasting. Taste a bite of the mozzarella cheese; if it does not taste salty, add a pinch or two of kosher salt to the pizza. (The pizza has olives, which also adds saltiness.) Top the cheese with the sliced olives and chili peppers.
- Transfer the pizza to the pizza stone using the pizza peel, then bake until the cheese is melted, about 7 minutes in the oven (or 1 minute in the pizza oven).
- Remove from the oven and allow to cool for minutes, then top with torn basil leaves. Slice into pieces and serve immediately.
More artisan pizza recipes
This spicy pizza diavola is one of our favorite artisan pizzas we’ve ever made at home! Here are a few of our other favorite homemade pizza recipes:
- Try our Neapolitan pizza or Margherita pizza.
- Go for unique pies like Mexican pizza, vegan pizza, cherry tomato pizza or Italian pizza.
- Mix up our favorite pizza sauce, pizza dough, or KitchenAid pizza dough.
- Try this calzone recipe.
I appreciate the fact that: 1) You had very interesting pizza recipes 2) I could print them out without having to enroll in some website! 3) I will come back to your website to look for other recipes when I’m interested in other things.
Bravo and God’s blessings.
Diavola is one of my favourite types of pizzas (except with the black olives) and adding some spice into it sounds good! Great recipe!
Just picked the last of the fresh basil from my garden!! This would be the perfect recipe to use some of it on! :)