Recipe: Pizza Planet Pizza

The Pizza Planet van can go anywhere — including your house with this DIY recipe.

We’ve always wanted to try the pizza from Pizza Planet in Toy Story, and now we can! Disney and Pixar provided this recipe for making Pizza Planet Pizza at home and we were so excited to try it. It even features our favorite little aliens from the claaaaaaaaaw machine as toppings!

Pizza Planet Pizza

Recipe by Disney/Pixar

Yields 1 pizza, 8 servings

Ingredients:

Alien Meatballs

• 2 cups cauliflower florets

• ½ cup basil pesto

• Egg whites from 2 large eggs

• 1 cup cooked green peas

• ½ cup canned white beans, drained and rinsed

• ½ cup whole wheat flour

• 1 teaspoon onion powder

Alien Faces

• 4-5 medium asparagus spears, cut into 24, 1-inch pieces

• 1 ounce goat cheese

• ¼ cup black olives, sliced into small pieces

Pizza

• 16 ounces pizza dough crust

• 1 cup pizza sauce

• ½ cup shredded mozzarella cheese

Instructions:

Prepare the Alien Meatballs

1. Preheat the oven to 350ºF and line a sheet pan with parchment paper.

2. Add the cauliflower to a food processor and process until finely ground.

3. Next add the pesto, egg whites, peas, beans, flour, and onion powder.

4. Pulse until fully combined.

5. Use a tablespoon to spoon the mixture onto the parchment paper.

6. Shape the meatballs into oval football shapes to resemble the alien heads.

7. Bake for 20 minutes.

8. Once the meatballs are cooked through, remove them from the oven and add the asparagus so that there are 3 pieces poking out of the top of each meatball (the antennas).

9. Bake for 2 more minutes to secure the asparagus.

10. Remove from the oven and let cool for about 10 minutes.

11. Once the meatballs are cool, you can add the rest of the toppings to complete the alien faces. Add 3 rolled up balls of goat cheese to each meatball to make the eyes. Then add a tiny piece of sliced olive to each of the eyes to make the pupils. For the mouth, add a larger piece of a sliced olive.

Make the Pizza

1. Set the oven to 400ºF.

2. Roll out and stretch your pizza dough to fit your pan or pizza stone, making sure it is evenly flattened.

3. Pinch the dough along the outside to form the crust.

4. Bake just the crust for about 10-12 minutes.

5. Remove from the oven and spread the sauce on the dough. Make sure to leave a 1 inch border for the crust.

6. Sprinkle the cheese evenly over the crust.

7. Bake the pizza again for 2-3 minutes.

8. Broil the pizza for 1-2 minutes until the cheese starts to brown.

9. Remove the pizza from the oven and add your alien meatball toppings.

10. Slice the pizza and enjoy!

Takeaway:

Cooking the crust by itself before adding in all of the toppings and broiling at the end gave the pizza the perfect texture. While the pizza from this recipe turned out to be really good, the alien meatballs were not as good as I thought they would be. They were very bulky and concentrated in one area of the pizza. I think it would be better to make the meatballs smaller and have more of them to add to the pizza. At the current size, you basically eat half the slice and then get to the giant meatball at the end. In my opinion, pizza toppings should be more evenly dispersed for a more consistent experience. It was also kind of difficult to add the faces to the alien meatballs because the outsides of the meatballs became too crispy in the oven and the toppings didn’t stick well. But overall, this was a fun pizza to make as a tribute to our favorite fictional pizza place, Pizza Planet!