I love tomato season. I love bacon = I love BLTs! But I also love the smoky tastes of a very simple to make BLT pizza, which is heavenly during tomato season.

I've been making this effortless meal for years, inspired to make it first from a California Pizza Company cookbook from way back in the day. Anyway, I can’t claim to have invented this one, don't know who did, but I do know that if you haven’t yet tried to make a BLT pizza for yourself, you’re missing out on one of life's true pizza pleasures.

Here is a very basic set of direction for making the pizza. It’s really about as easy as it gets and if you've ever made a pizza before, you'll handle this one with ease.

BLT Pizza

• Some pizza dough (either make your own or buy some refrigerated ready to bake crust dough)(here is a link to a good recipe for pizza dough, originally from bread guru Peter Reinhart)
• Luscious ripe, juicy and fragrant seasonal tomatoes cut into slices (never subjected to the indignity of the refrigerator…cold kills tomato taste)
• Olive oil
• Grated mozzarella cheese
  
• Bacon
• Lettuce (of your choice – I like a romaine for this)
• Mayo
• salt and pepper
  

No need for precise direction here, you can’t really go wrong…

1. Heat your oven as hot as she'll go, preferably using a pizza stone or tiles for some radiant heat along the base.
   
2. Gently work the crust out into desired shape/thickness. Never use a rolling pin to do this, as you flatten all the lovely textured bubbles in the dough if you do. Please see instructions on perfect pizza crust making, for detailed tips on making a great base.
3. Spread the cheese out along the base of the crust
   
4. Arrange the tomato slices over the cheese in slightly overlapping rings. Drizzle on a little olive oil and toss on a pinch of salt.
5. Slide the pizza into your oven for between 3 and 12 minutes, depending on the thickness of your crust and the heat of your oven (thin crust pizzas in a very hot wood burning oven may not even need 3 minutes to cook!)(if you ever feel like making a very easy/cheap backyard mud/clay pizza oven, see instructions here)
6. While your pizza is cooking, fry up some bacon, to your desired crispiness, and then cut into largish bite sized pieces.
7. When the pizza has finished baking, tear some lettuce into bite sized pieces and mix it together with a bit of mayonnaise – just enough to coat it completely, but not so much as to make a gloopy mess.
8. Toss your cooked bacon on the top of the pizza and top the bacon with the lettuce in mayonnaise.

This is heavenly. One reason it tastes so great is the contrast between the hot, savory tomatoes on the pie with the coolness of the lettuce – so this is best enjoyed immediately after topping with the lettuce.