Roast This Fruit In Your Pizza Oven For A Elevated Dessert

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As its name implies, a pizza oven has a clear purpose and utilizes super high heat to create perfectly crispy, charred pizza crusts, bubbly cheese, and roasted toppings in minutes. However, your pizza oven's super high temperatures will also benefit other dishes and ingredients, like bananas. For an elevated dessert that's ready in minutes, you should roast bananas in your pizza oven.

Bananas are one of the most widespread and budget-friendly fruits that we always seem to have a surplus of. And while we've come up with 14 banana recipes to use up any extra overripe bananas, they all involve incorporating bananas into a multi-ingredient recipe. For something easier, roasting bananas in a pizza oven will efficiently caramelize their sugars while softening them into creamy, melt-in-your-mouth dessert centerpieces.

Bananas may be an unexpected food for your pizza oven, but we received expert advice on how to cook them directly on a pizza stone, like this one from RocksHeat. You don't even have to take them out of their peels; simply add whole bananas to a warm pizza stone, pop them into the pizza oven, and bake for a few minutes, flipping the bananas halfway through. The pell will trap the sweet, bubbly goodness and keep it from oozing onto the pizza stone as it cooks. Then, all that's left to do is scoop out the caramelized banana and enjoy.

Cooking bananas in their skin is the easiest dish-free way to achieve a single-ingredient roasted dessert. You can top them with a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream; Van Leeuwen is a popular brand of vanilla ice cream that we ranked as a favorite. You could finish the dessert with a sprinkling of cinnamon and chopped pecans for some spicy crunch, or take the dessert in a more tropical direction with shredded coconut and cashews.

Another cooking method for pizza oven bananas is to use a cast-iron skillet like this one from Lodge to allow for a more elaborate dessert. The most famous skillet-fried banana dessert is bananas foster, but you could swap the usual stovetop method for the pizza oven, heating butter and sugar in a cast iron skillet until bubbling before adding peeled and vertically halved bananas, banana liqueur, and a splash of rum.

You could also make a banana crumble in a cast-iron skillet in about 10 minutes using wood-fired bananas that you've scooped out of their peels. Simply give the roasted bananas a quick mash with cinnamon and brown sugar in the skillet, top them with crumbles of oats, flour, butter, and brown sugar, and roast them in the pizza oven till the top is golden brown.