Greek Pizza - Dan's Newest Pizza Innovation

It's no secret that Dan has seriously amped up his homemade pizza making skills lately, and today's creation just topped it off.  In addition to making traditional red sauce pizzas, Dan recently had a the great idea of making his own rendition of a Greek pizza - incorporating quintessentially Greek ingredients such as olives, halloumi cheese and octopus.  Although it may sound odd to a pizza purist, I was sold immediately and had a good hunch that it'd be delicious.

We stopped in at Mediterranean Foods II to get most of the ingredients including a variety of black olives, halloumi cheese (Chorio brand) and marinated octopus.  All ingredients were fresh and delicious and essential to the success of this pizza.  Here's how Dan constructed it:

Dan's Greek Pizza (serves 2-3)
1 lb of store bought dough (or you can do homemade)
1/2 lb of halloumi cheese cut into 1/4" squares
1/2 cup of freshly made olive tapenade (see method below)
1/4 small red onion, sliced thin
1/4 cup of marinated octopus, sliced into small pieces
Olive oil

Directions:
Preheat oven to 525 F.  Place pizza stone into the oven.

Make the olive tapenade by chopping 1 cup of mixed black olives and 2 cloves of garlic.  Mix with a glug of olive oil (about 2 tbsp), pepper and coriander to taste.

Roll and stretch out the pizza dough until you get an 12 inch pie and top with tapenade, halloumi cheese, octopus and red onion.  Set the oven to broil and put in your pizza.  Bake for 10-12 minutes or until the crust is fluffy and golden brown.

Make sure you keep a good eye on the pizza because it cooks faster than you may think.