Monday, July 20, 2009

Three Vegan Pizzas


Sorry, I got a little sidetracked and never got around to completing my last series of posts about the Home Made challenge! I last left off posting the pizza dough recipe, but never got around to the actual pizza recipes. But now, after long last, here they are!!


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White Mushroom & Rosemary Truffle Pizza

The Whole Wheat Pizza Crust recipe we got from the Chopping Block worked really well for this pizza, since we were able to spread out really thin. It ended up being an almost cracker-like crust.

This was a real easy one to make. First, take a round ball of dough, and spread it out as thin as possible in the shape of a circle, and place it on a pizza stone or baking sheet.


Next, bake the crust in the oven at 350 degrees until crisp. Then we topped it with mushrooms, rosemary, truffle salt, and truffle-infused olive oil. We placed it back in the oven until the mushrooms were cooked. It made a great appetizer pizza!

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A Cheeseless Veggie Pizza

This one was a little more labor intensive. First, we had to make a sauce. We cheated a little and used some fire-roasted canned tomatoes. We seasoned it to taste with salt, pepper, oregano, basil, and garlic.

We had some frozen spinach on hand, so we microwaved that to thaw, and also chopped up some fresh red pepper and white mushrooms. We rolled the dough out into a rectangle to fit our baking sheet, but didn't make it as thin as the first pizza. We wanted to keep the crust thick to be able to handle all the toppings we were using. We rolled the edges over to make a crust and hold in the sauce.

Again, we pre-baked the crust for about 10 minutes, then piled on all the toppings. Bake until cooked through.


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A Vegan Cheese & Sausage Pizza

This one took the longest to make, despite being pretty easy on the preparation. We used the same dough and sauce as the veggie pizza, but added some vegan substitutes for more traditional pizza toppings.

For the sausage, we used Upton's Naturals Italian Sausage Seitan Crumbles

And for the cheese, we used a half block each of Follow Your Heart Vegan Gourmet Cheddar and Mozzerella cheeses.


After pre-cooking the dough as before, and layering on the sauce, we generously sprinkled the sausage crumbles and shredded cheese on top of our circular-shaped pizza dough. We left some of the crust exposed on the edges for easier handling while eating ;-)

The part that took the longest was getting the cheese to melt. We had to cover the exposed crust with foil to prevent burning, then turned up the temperature to 550 degrees. It took a while to start melting, but once it did, it went fast! We had to take turns watching it to make sure we didn't end up with a burnt pizza!!



But it was definitely worth the wait! It was a pretty awesome vegan pizza, and I didn't even have to worry too much about over-indulging since my lactose-intolerant self can handle vegan cheese no problem :D