RECIPE: Cheesy French bread pizza in minutes

French bread pizza is usually a slapdash dinner thrown together with grocery store bread, jarred sauce and a bit of cheese. The bread is often soggy and limp, with either barely melted or completely charred cheese. It’s fine, when you need a meal in a pinch, but not exactly a substitute for professionally made pies. Luckily, it isn’t very difficult or time-consuming to make a great French bread pizza.

This recipe takes inspiration from one J. Kenji López-Alt published years ago on Serious Eats. I’ve streamlined and tweaked the method over the years to yield an easy and quick version, but the main objectives — turn average grocery store French bread (the variety from Publix works great) into garlic bread and melt some of the cheese under the sauce to prevent sogginess hold true. Smashing the halved loaf of bread before adding garlic butter and cheese helps to even out the bread in a flat layer (but don’t sweat it if you can’t get the bread completely flat).

Once you’ve tried this cheese-only version, feel free to tweak the toppings to your liking. My family loves a bit of pepperoni, but any topping — sausage, mushrooms, peppers or olives — would work well. Make sure to pre-cook anything that either takes more than 10 minutes to cook through or, like spinach, contains a lot of liquid that would seep into the pizza itself.