My love for pizza runs deep. I like pizza in any form. From gourmet to frozen and deep dish to thin & crispy, I love it ALL.
I really enjoy making my own pizza dough, but let’s be real – some nights that’s just too much work. Enter the tortilla! I love tortillas and use them for everything. I don’t remember the last time I bought a loaf of bread, but I always have tortillas in my fridge (I make them myself once in a while too).
With a quick five minute pre-bake, less than five minutes to top the pizzas, and then another brief five minute bake to finish them off, these incredibly delicious, thin & crispy pizzas will be ready to eat in 15 minutes. What more could you ask for? I made my pizzas vegetarian, but you could always use leftover grilled chicken breasts or some rotisserie chicken in place of the black beans. I also thought this would be amazing with some crushed pineapple (very, VERY well drained) and cilantro. So many possibilities! I can tell this is going to be my new favorite thing! Woot!
The other awesome thing about this recipe is that you can keep all of the ingredients in your fridge and just bake up one or two at a time. The ingredients below are enough for 8 pizzas, but make as many as you want!
BBQ Black Bean Pizzas
Servings 8 pizzasIngredients
- 8 fajita size flour tortillas ($1.43)
- 3/4 cup BBQ sauce ($0.99)
- 1 15oz. can black beans ($0.63*)
- 2 cups shredded monterrey jack cheese ($2.39)
- 3 whole green onions ($0.33)
- 1 small red onion ($0.44)
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place the tortillas on a wire cooking rack and transfer the rack into the oven. Bake for 5 minutes, or until the tortillas have stiffened slightly, but are not yet crisp. If making more than two pizzas at once, you'll need to do this in batches.
- While the tortillas are pre-baking, thinly slice the red and green onions. Leave the tortillas on the cooling rack while adding the toppings. Top each pizza with 1-1.5 tablespoons of BBQ sauce, 1/4 cup of black beans (well drained), 1/4 cup shredded cheese, and a light sprinkle of both red and green onions.
- Transfer the cooling rack and topped pizzas back into the oven for an additional 5 minutes, or until the edges are golden brown and crispy, and the cheese is melted and bubbly. The tortillas might still be slightly soft after five minutes, but will crisp up after removing them from the oven.
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Notes
Nutrition
Step by Step Photos
This is all it takes to make some super quick and delicious pizzas! Most of this I already had on hand. The fajita-sized tortillas are bout 6-8 inches in diameter.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and then pre-bake the tortillas for about five minutes. This will stiffen them up just enough so that they can be topped and put back in the oven without being all floppy. I pre-baked mine on a baking sheet and the baked the topped pizzas directly on the oven rack. That was a bit tricky, though, and while they were baking I thought about this…
If you have a wire cooling rack, it is perfect for allowing the bottom to crisp up while giving the pizza enough support with the heavy toppings. It will also make them easy to transport in and out of the oven. The wires on the cooling rack are closer together than the wires on the oven rack, which will help prevent the edges from falling through and dripping sauce and cheese onto the floor of the oven.
Anyway, after the tortillas are baked for a few minutes, spread some BBQ sauce on top. You’ll want about one to 1.5 tablespoons of BBQ sauce per pizza.
Then sprinkle about 1/4 cup of WELL DRAINED black beans on each pizza. You want to make sure they’re not dripping wet because the more moisture there is on top of the pizzas, the heavier they’ll be and the less the tortilla will hold up.
Then add about 1/4 cup of shredded cheese to each. One thing I learned back when I made pizzas for a living is that you always need less cheese than you think. Sprinkle it on sparingly, so that you can still see the sauce underneath. Once it melts, it will cover sufficiently. Cheese is usually one of the most expensive pizza toppings, so this is a trick that most commercial pizzarias use.
Lastly, add your onions. Now, I baked my pizzas directly on the oven rack so that the bottom would crisp up, but the cooling rack is a much better option. I had to use a wide spatula to transfer the pizzas from the baking sheet into the oven, which was tricky because they were not yet completely crisp.
The wires of the oven rack were kind of far apart and the sides of the pizzas kind of fell down in as they baked. If I had thought of the wire cooling rack before, it would have been much easier. Anyway. Bake for about five minutes more (still 400 degrees), or until the edges are nicely golden brown and the cheese is melted and bubbly.
And then they’re freakin’ gorgeous and equally as delicious! The tortilla are still a bit flexible when you take them out, but within a minute or so of taking them out of the oven that steam evaporates and they crisp right up.
Proof that it was crispy! No bending or flopping with this tortilla pizza! OMG, it was so delish.
This was a TOTAL WINNER. It’s all too easy to eat two of these, so you might want to think ahead and make a side salad :P
Do you put the tortillas back in when it’s still pre baking or wait til it hits 400? Making them right now!! :)
I waited until the oven was fully preheated. I hope yours turned out good!
Hi Beth, I’m making this tonight! I love your blog and I’ve been following since 2010. Can I ask you though, will mozzarella cheese substitute okay?
Yep, mozzarella would still be great :)
Oh my gosh I had almost this same exact idea, except with a different sauce and no onions (used tomato and lettuce). Once I used guacamole and another time I made a chipotle sauce. This looks really good, I’m definitely going to have to try it!
I try to avoid gluten, and don’t think this would be so hot on a corn tortilla, so I will use this as my topping the next time I make GF pizza dough. It looks yummy!
Someone else made it on corn tortilla without the pre-bake and they said it turned out good. Maybe try a batch. You could always turn the rest of the tortillas into something else if it doesn’t work out.
I have eaten this two days in a row now! LOVE IT! I made mine on whole wheat tortillas. Yum, yum, yum.
I just saw this idea a few weeks ago at a party with friends! Rather than heat the oven the tortillas were being pre-crisped in a stove top pan, placed in a small, round, disposable (or reusable!) aluminum container, topped how each guest liked their pizza, and then put on a charcoal grill with the lid on for five-ten minutes. It was interactive, easy, and cheap, since guests were invited to bring their fave pizza toppings (any meats pre-cooked) to share! Glad you’ve posted this, and I like the idea of black beans + BBQ sauce.
Wow… realized I had all the ingredients for this, so you can bet I just whipped this up for lunch! I didn’t have any good BBQ sauce, so I made my own sauce with ketchup and buffalo sauce and some garlic powder. Also added corn to the toppings – so good! Thanks for another great quick fix, Beth!
I love pizza too and you and your site almost as much…..you totally rock! please keep blogging.
thanks.
I”ll be making those this weekend!
I love this idea. We love homemade pizza at my house but I don’t always have the necessary items on hand. I always have tortillas on hand! I think this will be dinner tonight. We’ll do some mixing and matching of ingredients and have personalized tortilla pizzas for dinner. Yummy!
This looks amazing! Some of my favourite flavours. I love making tortilla pizzas – so easy and you can pick exactly what toppings you like :) great idea!
Fast, easy, delicious. Just the way I like it!
OMG, Agreed fresh to frozen, just gimme pizza! And even better I have all this on hand, Lunch is calling. Thanks, Beth!
Those look awesome! Can’t wait to try. I do butter chicken pizzas on Naan (butter chicken sauce, some veggies, maybe some shredded chicken if I have leftovers and a bit of cheese).
OMG! That looks so delicious! I am on my way to the kitchen to whip this up right this moment! I’m so glad to see black beans used in this recipe I cooked a bag of them and canned them for later use, I’m going to use this recipe to use some of them up!