Brunch pizzas turn Friday night feast into fuel for weekend mornings

After a long day working catering jobs, Ryan Mondragon often comes home hungry for pizza – but not the wood-fired American pies he serves up as a mobile pizza catering operator in Modesto, California.

“I love breakfast for dinner,” says Mondragon, whose brick-and-mortar operation, Sanctuary Pizzeria, is opening in Modesto this fall. “I always make breakfast pizzas with whatever I have in my house.”

In late July, Mondragon competed in the Innovative Wildcard category at the California Pizza Contest, sponsored by the California Milk Advisory Board. And no surprise, his entry was a breakfast pizza. Featuring red peppers, chorizo, linguica and candied pickled jalapeños, the Golden Valley Breakfast Pizza (pictured above) is smoky, salty, spicy and pleasing to the eye.

“Whatever you eat for breakfast, you can put it on a pizza,” Mondragon says. “You could do a Hollandaise-style breakfast pizza.”

And in fact, Gloria De La Rosa of New York-based Black Oak on Fifth does just that.

One Brunch Menu, Two Pizzas

In the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, Black Oak on Fifth offers weekend brunch service that is popular with the community. Breakfast pizza has been a staple on the pizzeria’s brunch menu ever since opening day: July 1, 2022.

“We wanted to keep the concept of ‘pizza all day,” De La Rosa tells Pizza Today, adding that the spot caters families and those who want a good meal with a cocktail.

Black Oak on Fifth offers two breakfast pizzas, both of them Neapolitan white pies. The first is a smoked salmon flatbread topped with goat cheese, spinach and poached egg. According to De La Rosa, patrons often order the flatbread with a side of Hollandaise sauce to recreate a smoked salmon benedict in pizza form.

Meanwhile, the site’s Breakfast Pizza features bacon, sweet Italian sausage, fresh mozzarella and two eggs, sunny side up. The bacon and sausage are lightly cooked before being added to the pizza pre-bake and finished in the restaurant’s stone oven.

De La Rosa explains that the oven features a spinning stone, which cuts down on the need to continuously rotate pizzas. That said, learning to crack the eggs gently and place the pizza in the oven without breaking the yolks is a learned skill.

“If you don’t break (the eggs) carefully enough – or if you try to make it in a hurry – it will break, so you have to start over,” De La Rosa says, adding that you must “not be too harsh with it, otherwise the yolk breaks, and that’s what you don’t want.”

When customers request their yolks a little more done, the kitchen will fire each pizza for longer.

Competition-worthy Breakfast

California Milk Advisory Board/The Food Connector

Back at the California Pizza Contest, Mondragon sought to convey a sense of place with his Golden Valley Breakfast Pizza.

“In the Central Valley, where I grew up, we have lots of Mexican and Portuguese people who live here. So, I grew up eating chorizo and linguica. That’s something you’ll find in every diner in the Central Valley,” he says, adding that it’s common in the region to blend Tabasco into pizza sauce to turn up the heat. “This is representative of where I’m from.”

In addition to chorizo and linguica, Mondragon’s breakfast pizza calls for Kentucky-style bacon, which he sources thinly sliced from a butcher in the Central Valley. He describes the cuts as a little bit leaner than traditional bacon and appearing more like ham.

“The bacon is cured, so it wouldn’t be a longer bake,” he says, adding that the bacon is finished atop the pizza, in the wood-fired oven. “All that fat will render into the pizza, and there is a lot of flavor there.”

Mondragon also sources candied pickled jalapeños from a friend in California’s Central Valley, saying locals call them “cowboy candy.”

For the competition pizza, he stuffs grilled Piquillo red peppers with smoked gouda and sliced chorizo.

As at Black Oak on Fifth, cooking the egg atop the pizza is one of the most challenging parts of this dish. Mondragon separates egg whites and yolks in advance, then dabs the whites around the pizza, on top of low-moisture mozzarella cheese, before baking. When the pizza is 70% cooked, and the egg whites are beginning to set, he drizzles egg yolk across the surface of the pizza and puts the pie back in the wood-fired oven to finish baking.

“I like runny eggs, and the egg was over-cooking because the pizza and the egg baked at different times,” Mondragon tells Pizza Today. “If I separate the egg yolk and finish it with the egg yolk, I get the runny egg yolk flavor that I love. The egg yolk will fall onto the plate, and you can dip your crust in it.”

If Mondragon was making a white pie, he says he would use feta with pickled vegetables to create a Greek-style breakfast pizza. Another idea? Biscuits and gravy-style pizza. “Being in the Central Valley, we’re surrounded by a lot of agriculture, a lot of different cheese companies,” he says. “Deconstruct (your favorite breakfast food) and put it on a pie.”

KATE LAVIN is Senior Editor at Pizza Today.

Read the October 2025 Issue of Pizza Today Magazine

It’s National Pizza Month! We’re celebrating all month long with pizzeria community impact stories. See how pizzerias are making a difference in their communities. The inaugural Pizza Expo Columbus takes over the Columbus Convention Center on Oct. 26-27. Get a preview of all the excitement to expect. In this issue, we also dive into what makes the perfect pepperoni slice and breakfast pizza inspiration. Find tips leadership traits and how to maximize user-generated content. Go to the October issue.