How To Make Breakfast Pizza

If cold leftover pizza is a breakfast you’d rather leave as a college memory, but the idea of pizza for breakfast still appeals, then this recipe is for you. You can find breakfast pizza pretty much anywhere, but there’s a version popular in the Midwest that we’re pretty smitten with. This regional speciality might seem standard at first — sausage, eggs, and cheese on a basic crust — but when you look closer, you’ll find a creamy cheese sauce in place of a haphazard handful of cheese, and hash browns tucked in under the layer of meat and eggs. It’s those details that make this gas station pizza one to be inspired by.

While you can make the entire pizza from start to finish in about an hour on a weekend morning, you can also make most of the toppings the night before and bake this pizza up in less than 30 minutes any day of the week.

The most famous Midwestern breakfast pizza was born from a chain of convenience stores in Iowa called Casey’s General Store. Casey’s locations make and sell breakfast pizzas all day long. Standard pizza dough is topped with their signature cheese sauce, sausage, scrambled eggs, and cheese. While you can switch out the other toppings, the cheese sauce really is the secret to making a breakfast pizza like Casey’s.

So how do you make a pizza for breakfast? The answer is the simple one you’re expecting: Top it with standard breakfast fare, but do it with some finesse. Ours gets sausage, hash browns, and scrambled eggs because it’s hearty, delicious, and reheats well. This recipe reads long, but you can make the cheese sauce, cook the sausage and eggs, and grate the cheese the night before and just assemble the pizza the next day.

• Cheese sauce: You can make the cheese sauce the night before and store it in an airtight container. Or feel free to use a prepared product such as Cheese-Wiz instead.
• Sausage: Bulk breakfast sausage is the way to go here. Cook it up the night before.
• Eggs: I’m usually not an advocate for cooking scrambled eggs in advance, but between the cheese sauce and the cheese on top, the pre-cooked eggs will steam to reheat and won’t dry out in the oven. These can be cooked the night before as well.
• Frozen hash browns: While homemade hash browns are tastier, using frozen hash brown potatoes and thawing them in the fridge overnight will save considerable prep time.

Breakfast pizza is a great way to use up leftovers. Cube leftover frittata (or breakfast casserole) and put that on the pizza instead of the scrambled eggs, or swap the hash browns for leftover roasted vegetables from last night’s dinner. The formula of pizza crust + cheese sauce + cheese + toppings will make those leftovers exciting again.