Spicy Pizza Diavola

Last month, Alex and I hopped on a plane to Italy, Croatia and Spain in search of culinary inspiration. Armed with a notebook, we set about to eat everything we could get our hands on. Several pages of notes and a transatlantic flight later, we’re trying to recreate our favorites in our home kitchen so you can taste them, too! And on this trip, we found spicy pizza diavola. We discovered it in Rome, at a brew pub of all places. A brew pub, in Italy? Yes, crazy as it sounds. And this spicy pizza diavola is ready to spice up your weekly Pizza Nights. (Because it’s a weekly affair in your house too, right?) Keep reading for our recipe.

What is spicy pizza diavola?

So, what is spicy pizza diavola? In Italian, pizza diavola means “deviled” pizza. And in this case, deviled means one thing: spicy. We tasted our first spicy pizza diavola at L’Osteria Birra del Borgo, one of our very favorite restaurants on this visit to Rome. The man behind this restaurant is known as the King of Pizza in Rome, Gabriele Bonci. Everything Bonci makes quite literally turns to gold, which we’ll write about in a separate post (!). But on this visit, it was the spicy pizza diavola from his new brew pub that was memorable for all the guests at our table.

How to make spicy pizza diavola

It appears that there is some variation in what constitutes a spicy pizza diavola. Here are a few common denominators we’ve found that match up with our experience of spicy pizza diavola in Rome:

Spicy chili peppers: Of course, chili peppers on pizza are what give the spicy pizza diavola its name! A fresh red pepper like a Fresno chili pepper or Calabrian chili pepper are what is traditional. (Calabrian chili peppers are used often in Italian cuisine and are our absolute favorite—we grow them in our garden and you can also find them canned by Dellalo.)Spicy sausage: The spicy pizza diavola we had in Rome had spicy sausage as a topping, and a few other online resources use sausage as a typical Diavola pizza ingredient. For this recipe, we left it off to make it vegetarian. Of course, you could absolutely add it back to this one if you’re serving meat lovers!Black olives: Olives seem to be optional, but the pizza we had in Rome had black olives so we’ve added them here. They add just the right amount of saltiness to the pizza—especially since our version is vegetarian.Margherita pizza base: We’ve seen spicy pizza diavola described as a margherita pizza with spicy peppers and sausage added. Here we’ve used our Perfect Neapolitan Pizza recipe as a base.

Do I need Neapolitan pizza oven?

So, do you need a pizza oven to make this spicy pizza diavola? Not at all! However, if you want those lovely char marks on the crust as we have in these photos, you’ll need a pizza oven. A pizza oven can get much hotter than a regular oven. While your standard oven tops out at 550 degrees F, a pizza oven can get up to almost 1000 degrees F! As I mentioned in our last pizza post, we did not own a pizza oven until recently. But we have been cooking with a new pizza oven for just under a year called the Ooni pizza oven. Powered by wood pellets, the Ooni heats to 1000 degrees Fahretheit in just 10 minutes! It takes a bit of practice, but it’s revolutionized our homemade pizza. Here’s the Ooni pizza oven that we use!