Friday, October 17, 2014

pizza night!










In many homes, Friday night is pizza night.  I'm not gonna lie, we don't do pizza often because of the lack of cheese.  I mean, cheese just makes a pizza.  Or so I thought.  This pizza just changed my mind.

It's simple.  Loaded with fresh toppings.  And SO GOOD. 

I'm sure there are very good pizza crust recipes out there, and I'll probably go looking for one, but here's the thing.  Trader Joes makes such a great pizza dough, and it's so inexpensive, that I just haven't bothered.  I usually get the garlic and herb flavor, but they have whole wheat and original as well.  (I believe they even have a gluten free option.)  So, that's where we started.  You need to let the pizza dough rest at room temp for around 20 minutes to let it puff up and become pliable.  Please don't use it right out of the fridge, it'll break and not rise correctly when baked.

While letting the dough rest, I made a quick bechamel of sorts.  It wasn't a true bechamel, because I used more chicken stock than coconut milk, but I followed the process.  First you make a roux out of some sort of fat (I used Smart Balance Light with Flaxseed Oil) and flour.  You heat it on high, creating almost a nutty brown paste-like substance, then you add your milk or cream or broth.  You're making a gravy here.  It should get thick.  Make it to your desired consistency.  You can see above what ours looked like on the pizza.  Then I added salt, pepper, garlic powder and nutritional yeast until it tasted somewhat cheesy.  Set aside.

Preheat your oven to the highest it'll go.  My oven goes to 550, so that's what we use.

Your dough should be pliable and soft now, so go ahead and pull it out of the package.  Use a rolling pin or your hands, up to you, but stretch it out to at least 12 inches long.  We like a thinner crust, so ours was longer.  Pizza is not an exact science.  Do what you like!

Now, for sauce we used a little bit of jarred spaghetti sauce (the Market Pantry brand from our chicken(no) parm) and spread it thin to about an inch inside the crust.  Then, we put our bechamel/"cheese" sauce into an icing bottle and put it on top of the sauce.  We don't use vegan cheese, so this sauce is in place of cheese.  Lay it on.

Then, the best part.  TOPPINGS!  Do what you like.  Live!  We put on spinach, mushrooms, green peppers, onion, chicken sausage, olives and tomato.  Once all of our toppings were piled high, we drizzled the pizza with olive oil and sprinkled on some kosher salt.  When you don't have cheese, you really miss that richness, so adding the oil and salt to the top will help balance that out.

Then, you're ready to bake!  It'll take about 8 to 10 minutes, per the package, though we used so many toppings we actually left it in more like 13 or 14 minutes.  When you pull it out, try not to eat it right away, ok?  It's hot.  SO HOT.  It'll be crispy and steaming and amazing.

I hope you enjoy this as much as we did!  And I really hope when you finish, you say OMG I barely even missed the cheese.  Happy Friday friends!

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