Homemade Pizza with Chicken and Bacon
on Feb 29, 2012, Updated Aug 22, 2024
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Take your homemade pizza to new heights with this recipe featuring chicken, bacon, and mushrooms slathered in melted cheese and creamy sauce. This Homemade Pizza with Chicken and Bacon is one of my kid’s favorite ways to eat pizza!
Holy cow, you haven’t lived until you’ve tried this pizza. Its savory toppings add so much flavor and texture, while the spinach white sauce adds a creamy base to hold it all together. Even though there are a couple types of protein, the mushrooms and spinach elements keep this a light and bright meal, perfect for casual spring and summer dinners.
So, roll up your sleeves, get your kids ready to help you roll out some dough, and enjoy this Chicken Bacon Mushroom Pizza with a Creamy Spinach Sauce! (OR make it family pizza night by adding some more of your favorite kinds like Supreme, Artichoke, Pineapple and more.)
Table of Contents
Why You’ll Love This Recipe
- Gourmet Flavors: It has all the delicious flavors you’d find at a gourmet pizza shop but you can make it yourself!
- Creamy White Sauce: There’s just something about a white sauce pizza that makes it feel more fancy than red sauce. This one is so good, too.
- Perfect for Pizza Night: Whether it’s just family or you’re having lots of friends over, pizza night is always a hit.
Ingredients
For the dough
- Warm Water
- Yeast
- Sugar
- Salt
- Olive Oil
- Flour
For the sauce
- Butter
- Flour
- Minced garlic
- Milk
- Cream Cheese
- Salt
- Pepper
- Baby Spinach: you can use fresh or frozen
For the toppings
- Shredded Mozzarella Cheese
- Shredded Cooked Chicken
- Sliced Mushrooms
- Bacon
See the recipe card below for full information on ingredients and quantities
How to Make Chicken Bacon Mushroom Pizza with Creamy Spinach Sauce
Step #1. Make the dough and let it rise for 15-60 minutes.
Step #2. While the dough is rising, make the Creamy Spinach Sauce. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
Step #3. Divide the dough into two equal pieces. Roll one half out, place on the pizza, stone and bake for 10 minutes. Remove the parbaked dough from the pizza stone and repeat with the other half.
Step #4. Top the parbaked crust with half of the sauce, chicken, bacon, and mushrooms then sprinkle with cheese. Repeat with the other crust. Bake for another 10-15 minutes until the cheese bubbles and starts to brown.
Recipe FAQs
I prefer to cook homemade pizza a little lower and longer than some people. I know some folks like to blast it in 400 to 450 degrees F., or even under the broiler, to get a really crunchy exterior on the crust and super soft inside. To me, it’s more important that all the flavors and ingredients have time to meld and bake into one another, getting cooked nicely all the way through for a perfectly textured bite every time. I pre-bake my crust at 375 degrees F. for 10 minutes, remove it from the oven to top it with all the things, and then bake it for another 15 to 20 minutes.
This is totally the fun in making homemade pizza! There are NO rules about toppings and what order to place them. You could do an inside out pizza and put the protein and veggies on first, followed by the cheese and spinach sauce. You could also layer the cheese so it’s below AND above the sauce and toppings. (Um, yum.) I did it more the traditional way here, which is: sauce first, toppings second, and cheese last. Sprinkle some herbs on top for a final freshness kick.
I think a lot of people get intimidated by homemade pizza dough, but I’m here to tell you that you can do it! This one is really hard to mess up, and you can sort of play with it until you get it exactly how you like it. It’s not like bread where you need it to be just so and expand perfectly in the oven. No matter what you do, this is going to taste delicious.
Expert Tips
Here are a few great tips from Bon Appetit magazine that you may find helpful in your homemade pizza endeavor!
- Don’t do store-bought. Hey, I knew I was onto something… Making your own dough allows for the freshest crust possible, and it’ll cook up a lot nicer than the stuff you’ll find at the store. The secret to my homemade pizza dough is a little bit of sugar, which creates a crispier crust by activating the yeast.
- Hand knead away. Do not — I repeat, do NOT — skip the kneading step for your dough! This is the crucial part of prep that gives pizza its amazing texture.
- Pre-bake (or “par-bake”) the dough. Cooking your crust for a few minutes sans toppings will allow it to hold all of those yummy additions without deflating or staying soft and soggy in the middle.
- Don’t overdo the toppings. Hey, I love a well-covered pizza as much as anyone else, but TOO many toppings is too much of a good thing. The slices will fall apart when you cut them if everything is piled too high, and your dough may not cook properly.
Other Homemade Pizza Dough Recipes
- Amazing No-Knead Refrigerator Pizza Dough
- How to Make Pizza Dough (Easy Pizza Dough Recipe!)
- 100% Whole Wheat Pizza Crust
Did you make this recipe? Leave a ⭐️ review and share it on Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest!
Homemade Chicken Bacon Pizza
Ingredients
Dough:
- 2 1/2 cups warm water
- 1 tablespoon yeast
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- 4-6 cups flour
Creamy Spinach Sauce:
- 1/4 cup butter, (you could also use some of the bacon grease from the pizza toppings combined with butter to equal a 1/4 cup of fat)
- 1/4 cup flour
- 1-2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1-2 cups milk
- 4 ounces cream cheese
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon pepper
- 4 ounces baby spinach, (chopped (half of a normal 9-ounce bag) or 1/2 a package of frozen chopped spinach)
- More salt to taste
Additional Toppings
- 3 cups mozzarella cheese, shredded
- 1 cup cooked chicken, shredded
- 1 package mushrooms, (9-ounce package), sliced
- 1/2 pound bacon, cooked and crumbled
Instructions
- In a large mixing bowl, add the water, yeast, sugar, salt, and olive oil. Allow mixture to stand for 5 minutes.
- Add one cup of flour, and mix to combine. Add another cup of flour, and mix thoroughly.
- Mix for 1 to 2 minutes. The dough should be the consistency of cake batter.
- Add another cup of flour, and mix well.
- Add flour until very thick and you can’t mix it by hand very well.
- Sprinkle some flour on your table, and turn the dough onto the table. Knead the dough by hand until it is smooth and elastic, adding flour as needed. This should take 6 to 10 minutes of kneading.
- Place the dough back in the bowl, cover it with a towel, and let it rise in a warm place for 15 to 60 minutes. (This time varies a lot for me — I just let it rise according to how long it is until dinner time).
- While the dough is rising, make the creamy spinach sauce. Recipe below.
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
- Divide the dough in half. Roll half of the dough out on a pizza stone. Bake for 10 minutes. Roll out the other half of the dough on another stone while the first is baking.
- After the 10 minutes of bake time, switch out the dough. Bake the second dough for 10 minutes, too. After you have pre-baked the crust, top with about a cup of the creamy spinach sauce and half of the cheese, chicken, mushrooms, and bacon.
- Bake for another 15 to 20 minutes, until the cheese is bubbly and the edges start to brown. Repeat with the second pizza.
Creamy Spinach Sauce
- In a medium saucepan, let the butter melt over medium heat.
- When it is all melted, add the flour, and stir to combine.
- Allow the mixture to cook for around a minute, stirring occasionally.
- Add the minced garlic, and cook until fragrant.
- Add 1 cup of the milk a little at a time, while whisking to combine.
- Add the cream cheese, salt, pepper, and spinach to the hot milk mixture. Stir frequently. The mixture will thicken as it cooks. If it is too thick, add a splash or two more of milk.
- Cook for 5 minutes. At the end of the 5 minutes, the mixture should be the consistency of a typical Alfredo sauce, if not a little thicker. Add milk if it is too thick. Take off the heat, and allow to cool slightly.
- Taste for salt, and add more if needed.
Notes
- You can make the dough with whole wheat flour or half whole wheat and half all-purpose if you’d like.
- The creamy spinach sauce is great as a dip for breadsticks too!
- The order that the toppings are put on doesn’t really matter so feel free to put them on in whichever order you like best.
- The more kinds toppings you want on your pizza, the less of each that you need. Too much on top of your rust will keep it from cooking enough.
Nutrition
This post was originally published in 2012 and has been updated and rephotographed in May 2019.
I made this again last night, but used broccoli instead of spinach. SO GOOD!!
Question: Does the recipe as-is make two whole pizzas, or were you saying in the beginning that you doubled the recipe listed to make 2 pizzas? I want to try this with one pizza, so I’m just wanting to make sure I halve the recipe requirements if this actually makes 2 pizzas, thanks!
It makes 2 pizzas! That was a little confusing huh! Enjoy Lauren!
yum! i know i would love this, but did your kids eat it? (mine will eat red enchiladas, but not white enchiladas)
May did pitch a fit about the pizza. She didn’t want to try it. She picked off the mushrooms (which I gobbled up) and finally tried it and then loved it. Everyone else loved it with out the fit 🙂 .
Melissa – I love this site. LOVE. And I’m pretty sure I’m going to die from the awesomeness of this recipe. And I pinned it. I hope scores of readers see it and want it and then follow your blog.
THANK YOU! I love that you love it! It’s so rewarding to know all this fun work isn’t just out in blogosphere with no one reading. Let me know how the pizza turns out!