The Holy Grail…a good paleo pizza

by lisa | 29 October 2012 15:22

We’re all searching for it. A paleo pizza that will come close to the cheesy bliss we remember. I’ve searched high and low and seen loads of interesting ideas for how to make a paleo pizza crust. I’ve seen crust made from cauliflower, eggplant, pureed chicken, ground beef, portobello mushrooms and of course almond flour and coconut flour. These are all tasty in their own right, but do they taste at all like pizza?

I recently got a new cookbook called Paleo Indulgences. I expected it to only have decadent dessert recipes, but it actually has a lot more than that. Which is a really good thing. I’ve got to stop making desserts. My current excuse is that I need to experiment with recipes so that I can blog about them. Really, I just like to eat.

This cookbook has a recipe for paleo pizza crust that I decided I just had to try. What caught my eye, was that the author said it doesn’t just taste like a bunch of nuts. It also has an ingredient that you don’t usually see in paleo recipes. Yeast. Yes, like the stuff you make bread with. This caused me to do a bit of research to see if yeast was really ok. I’m not a paleo perfectionist (what shade of paleo are you?) but I do keep it pretty clean. I ran across this post by Sarah at ThePaleoMom and decided that yeast was okay. I love reading the science side of things and Sarah is a scientist so I was satisfied with her explanation.

Paleo Pizza Crust

Yeast Mixture

1/4 cup (60ml) warm water
2 tsp honey
2 tsp active dry yeast

Dry Ingredients

3/4 cup (90 grams) almond flour
3 Tbsp coconut flour
2/3 cup (80 grams) arrowroot powder (called Pfeilwurz in German and available at reform hauser and bio ladens)
pinch of sea salt

Wet ingredients

1 egg
2 tsp olive oil
1 tsp apple cider vinegar

How to:

Preheat your oven to 425 F (220 C).
Place the yeast ingredients in a small bowl and mix. Let it sit for 4-5 minutes until it gets all foamy.
Place the dry ingredients in a medium bowl and whisk together.
Add the yeast and the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix with a hand mixer.
Scoop your dough out onto a parchment-lined baking sheet and use a spatula to spread it evenly into a circle. Ours made a 9 inch crust.
Bake for 9-10 minutes. Remove from the oven, carefully flip the crust over with a spatula, top with sauce and your favorite toppings and then bake for 5-10 minutes more.

Pizza Sauce

Ingredients

5 plum tomatoes cut in half
2 Tbsp olive oil
dried basil
1-2 cloves of garlic
salt, pepper and dried basil to taste

How to:

Place your tomatoes, cut side up, on a foil-lined baking sheet.
Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle on salt, pepper and basil.
Throw your garlic cloves (unpeeled) onto the baking sheet as well.
Optional: you could also throw on a red or green bell pepper and some onions to roast as well.
Throw into your pre-heated oven. We cooked our tomatoes on the broiler setting for about 20 minutes because we are impatient. You could cook them slower in a 200 C (400F) oven for 45 minutes.
Oven-roasted tomatoes
After removing from the oven, peel your garlic and throw the garlic and tomatoes into a food processor or blender and whiz it up. Taste and adjust seasonings if needed.
Ready to whiz
This made about 2 cups of sauce. Left over sauce is wonderful in an omelette the next morning or over chicken breasts the next night. Just sayin’.

Toppings

Here’s where you can get creative and put whatever you like on your pizza. We made a homemade spice blend (Italian sausage flavor) and mixed it into ground beef/ground pork and made sausage patties that we crumbled onto our pizza. We also added onions, red peppers and some raw buffalo mozzarella (we occasionally eat dairy, but not much). Other things that would be good: prosciutto, grilled eggplant, bacon…the possibilities are endless.

Pizza!

And the verdict….

We thought it was really good and we ate the whole pizza. The yeast did give it a more authentic taste. Was it the same pizza of old? No, but we weren’t expecting it to be. There was no processed cheese, there was no gluteny crust and there was no greasy pepperoni. There were also no stomach aches, no bloating, no waking up in the night dying of thirst and no regrets 🙂

Enjoy!

We shared this recipe at Slightly Indulgent Tuesdays, Gluten Free Fridays