Saints Sa­vor: Mug Pizza

The mi­crowave meal ad­ven­ture con­tin­ues this week with a mi­crowave­able “cheese pizza in a mug”. Who would have thought that a pizza could be quickly made from scratch and cooked in a mug, let alone in a mi­crowave? Here is the recipe for you to check out for your­self!

I am not sure if what I made could be con­sid­ered a pizza, but it was not a bad dish in the end. I was skep­ti­cal when I made home­made pizza dough in un­der one minute. Putting dough into the mi­crowave did not seem like a very log­i­cal idea, but I con­tin­ued to fol­low the recipe. An­other odd step was the idea of putting the sauce and cheese over the un­cooked dough. It was tough to fig­ure out how it was go­ing to work. How­ever, this step can be al­tered with dif­fer­ent in­gre­di­ents to fit your own pref­er­ences. 

Re­nee Rhyne, a sec­ond-year stu­dent at Maryville stated, “I would make a recipe like this be­cause I per­son­ally do not like a lot of sauce on my pizza and this recipe makes it more cus­tomiz­able to my own pref­er­ences.” This recipe is very easy to al­ter and cus­tomize to your own lik­ings. 

An­other nice thing about this recipe is that it can also be changed to fit di­etary needs. Vic­to­ria Cur­ran, a fourth-year stu­dent at Maryville looked at the recipe and said, “be­ing gluten-free, it makes it hard to find things I can both eat and en­joy. I think this recipe would be good be­cause I can mod­ify it to my di­etary needs.” 

Rhyne and Cur­ran both com­mented on how the pizza fits their per­sonal wants and needs, which makes this use­ful for stu­dents to make in their dorm mi­crowave. 

I changed one thing when I was mak­ing my “pizza in a mug.”I am not a huge fan of pep­per­oni pizza and I pre­fer plain cheese pizza, so I per­son­al­ized it for my­self. Re­gard­ing the ital­ian herbs, I sprin­kled on some oregano, but it is up to you for which herbs you would like to use for your own pizza. 

Be­sides the fact that the recipe seemed a lit­tle odd in its ways of putting this mug pizza to­gether, the re­sult was sur­pris­ing. The pizza ac­tu­ally looked ed­i­ble and de­li­cious! Once I as­sem­bled all of the in­gre­di­ents into my mug, I popped it into the mi­crowave for one minute and twenty sec­onds. The dough was cooked through and the cheese bub­bled on top. The cook time and prepa­ra­tion time were suf­fi­cient and ac­cu­rate. 

Af­ter your mug pizza is done cook­ing, you may want to go back and add ad­di­tional cheese if it got too ab­sorbed into the crust while cook­ing. An­other thing that could help the cook­ing process is us­ing a wide, shal­low mug, com­pared to a tall and skinny mug be­cause the dough is go­ing to rise in the mi­crowave. When I made mine, the ra­tio of dough to top­pings was off. If you use a wide, shal­low mug, the pizza dough will give more of a sur­face for the sauce and cheese on top. 

All in all, this mug pizza recipe is a per­fect snack dur­ing your af­ter­noon home­work or to solve a mid­night crav­ing. With lit­tle prepa­ra­tion and sup­plies, this recipe al­lows stu­dents to make a per­sonal pizza any way they like. 

The pizza turned out a lot bet­ter than my pre­vi­ous recipe, “french toast in a mug.” My search for mi­crowave meals is grow­ing with bet­ter re­sults. Some recipes will be a flop, how­ever, some recipes will be a nice touch to the menu of a col­lege stu­den­t’s dorm room.