Elevate Your Pizza with This Gourmet Canned Fruit Addition

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Canned ingredients can help to spruce up frozen pizza and homemade pizza alike. Pineapple might be the most common canned fruit topping for a savory dish like pizza, but canned figs are the bougie ingredient that can produce something like you’d see in a high-end pizzeria. Fresh figs are a fleeting seasonal fruit, but canned figs are year-round, shelf-stable products that retain the form of their fresh counterparts. 

Fig spread (like this one from Divina) is one of the most common accompaniments for a cheese board, not to mention a sweet sauce stand-in for many fig pizza recipes. Canned figs, however, bring a textural upgrade as whole fruits. Plus, they’ve been soaking in simple syrup to make them especially sweet, plump, and juicy, so they won’t dry out in a super hot oven. You can find canned figs in cans and jars at the grocery store or online. While you might consider dried figs as an equally accessible and available pizza topping, their much-changed textural and visual characteristics won’t do your pizza justice.

You can add whole figs to a freshly baked pizza once you’ve taken it out of the oven, as a fresh topping like arugula. But an even better way to ensure even distribution and a colorful presentation is to slice the drained canned figs horizontally into thin rounds to bake with cheese and other toppings. Their deep pink or purple flesh dotted with crunchy seeds and a thin yet chewy ring of peel is the impeccable trifecta of taste, texture, and presentation your pizza needs.

Figs are sweet and rich with chewy and crunchy textures that will pair well with unique cheese, sauce, and topping combinations. We have numerous fig recipes you can draw inspiration from for ideas on pizza topping combinations. One of our favorites is a fig flatbread with goat cheese, salami, and arugula, which you can use canned figs on. If you want an especially gourmet combination, try pairing figs with caramelized onions and hickory-smoked bacon.

Another popular fig and cheese pairing to consider for pizza is brie. You could even create a baked brie pizza using pastry dough, like Pillsbury crescent dough sheets, for the crust to top with a rosemary-infused cream sauce, pieces of brie, thinly sliced canned figs, and chopped walnuts. Top that ultra-rich fig and brie pizza with a drizzle of tangy balsamic reduction. Just as goat cheese brings a gamey funkiness to complement a fig’s sweetness, blue cheese is another great complement. You can start with a tangy Dijon vinaigrette, followed by shredded mozzarella, dots of blue cheese, canned fig rounds, prosciutto, and thinly sliced red onions.