Homemade pizza is no big deal, but a good pizza that doesn’t use gluten or lactose, that’s a bigger challenge. I found a great crust recipe online, and combined it with my favorite sauce.
First thing to do is to make the sauce. Open a 15 ounce can of a good quality organic tomato sauce, put it in a sauce pan (a pan that has a lid unless you have a burning desire to clean tomato splatters off all over your entire kitchen). Stir in spices, as follows:
1/8 teaspoon onion powder
1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground oregano
freshly ground black pepper, probably 1/4 teaspoon, but go with your instincts on this one
2 teaspoons dried basil
Now, stir well and heat, reducing the volume of the sauce and intensifying the flavors. Cover while reducing and stir frequently. Reduce by about a third. You’ll notice no salt is added to the sauce. Canned tomato sauces already have salt in them.
While that is cooking slice up whatever ingredients you want in your pizza, and grate some mozzarella cheese (soy or rice milk are what I use).
Cooked sauce, sliced veggies, grated cheese, and a pan
This is an 8 inch spring form pan, and it is very useful for making a deep dish pizza, Chicago style. Now we need the crust. A KitchenAid mixer is pretty much required, I think, for making a gluten free crust.
Place the following dry ingredients in the mixer bowl
2/3 cup brown rice flour
1/2 cup tapioca flour
1 Tablespoon yeast
2 teaspoons xanthan gum
1 teaspoon gelatin
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
2 Tablespoons dry soy milk powder
Turn the mixer on to the lowest speed and let it combine these dry ingredients.
Dry ingredients ready to be stirred
Low speed, stir while organizing wet ingredients
In a small container, combine:
2/3 cup very warm water
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon olive oil
1/2 teaspoon honey
Stir well and pour slowly into the dry ingredient, increasing the speed to medium when all the wet ingredients have been added.
This is very sticky stuff
Once this dough is all combined, beat it on a fairly high speed for a couple of minutes and add, a teaspoon at a time, brown rice flour until the dough is no long looking super sticky. It will still be wet, so keep the brown rice flour handy to sprinkle on top of the dough once you have it in the pan. Otherwise it will stick more to your hands than in the pan.
Finished dough, spread into the greased pan and up the sides
Once the dough has been spread out in the pan as evenly as you can on the bottom and up the sides, pop it into a hot 425F oven and bake for 10 minutes. MAKE SURE you place this spring form pan into another dish or on a baking sheet with a rim all the way around, so that spray oil doesn’t leak out in the oven and make a cloud of smoke (yeah, I speak from experience here).
Put cheese in first, and then add other fillings
Because this a Chicago style deep dish pizza, the cheese goes in first, and we’ve noticed the rice milk style cheese work best this way, being melted in the middle of a dish instead of on top like normal cheese.
Finally, cover everything with the reduced sauce
At this point you cover the fillings with the reduced sauce, and I like to add a couple of tablespoons of Parmesean cheese. Even though I am allergic to milk, a good quality Parmesean once a week, less than a tablespoon worth as a flavoring doesn’t bother me.
Now put the whole pizza, which in this picture is resting inside of a cake pan large enough to hold the spring form pan, back into the 425F oven and bake for another 25 minutes.
A pretty pizza
Remove the pizza from the oven, let it cool a few minutes and then remove the spring form pan and slide the pizza onto a plate for serving.
Cut the pizza into quarters and dive in. Depending on what sorts of things you add, each piece of pizza will be 320 calories and up. This is a very low fat recipe, if you use the rice milk cheese especially. And it is so delicious. It reheats very well. Just reheat it in foil, at 350F until it is warm through.