I recently was in Palm Beach for a family occasion, and we had pizza while we were there, but it was what I'd call New Jersey standard fare. Judging my the origins of most of the residents, and the complete lack of what I'd call a native trope in architecture, food, or culture, I suspect New Jersey cuisine is as close to "authentic" as one is going to get for this area. I did fall to thinking: what would constitute a native recipe here? (For all I know there may really be a Palm Beach Island Pizza recipe, but I'm taking the pledge and not googling for one before I post this recipe.) South Florida does have an agreeable mish-mosh of immigrant communities from north and south, and there may be a vestige of internal native Floridian cuisine to be had (grits are still on the menu, including at the Indian breakfast place my sister took us out to), but I couldn't put my finger on a South Floridian cuisine that has yet emerged. Not enough time to gad about, I suspect, to find it. In any event, I did notice both a slightly higher than normal incidence of mango about, and I was bemused to hear of a B&B frequented by family friends called the "Mango Inn", and when I started to make a traditional Hawaiian pizza the other day, I discovered we had no pineapple about the place but I did have a nice supply of mangoes. Hence this experiment, which turned out to be a nice enough result that I thought it worth preserving in our recipe files.
I note parenthetically that I am not usually one for the "sweet" pizza, but this turned out to be a very nice blend and my own exception to the rule of preferring savory or tangy 'za.
Palm Beach Island Pizza
Use a thin crust. I used my habitual 2/3 whole wheat 1/2 white flour recipe, divided in half, pre-baking the crust for 5 minutes.
red pizza sauce (mild, almost no spicing)
mozzarella
thin-slivered fresh basil
diced fresh mango (I'm sure frozen will do fine, mango comes out of the freezer unusually well)
pre-cooked black forest ham, diced into tiny cubes
parmiggiano
put down the sauce, top with the cheese, then the ham. Bake @425 for about 10 minutes. Add the mango, basil slivers, and a thin topping of grated parm; return to the oven until the cheeses just start to brown.
