The pizza above was my first attempt at a gluten free pizza. Came out really good. The crust looked like it would have the texture of cardboard, but was surprisingly soft and moist. For the crust I used quinoa and buckwheat flour. Next time I make this pizza, I will try mostly or all quinoa flour. 
This is another vegan pizza I make the same night. However, for this one I used regular flour.
Tomato, Bacon and Sweet Pepper Pizza
I can't get enough of Mel's pizza plates! They make pizza look beautiful. So last night we had a couple of friends over for pizza. Afterward we went downtown in San Jose, CA and watched the Goonies outdoors with lots of other people. We had a really great time, only enhanced by great pizza and friends!
For the last couple of days, it has been Pizza Time! at our house. This pizza is an arugula Pesto based pizza. The crust is a garlic and rosemary flavored with flaxseed. I have recently started to par-cook my doughs after they have been rolled out, as it makes them less delicate, cook more evenly and easier to slide off the cutting board and into the oven.
I started off with an arugula-walnut pesto, evenly spread over the par-cooked dough. I like to make sure that I spread the sauce all the way to the edges so that every bite has enough moisture included in it. With pestos, it is especially tasty to spread it out to the edges, as the oil will soak into the edges, keeping your last bites moist and flavorful. Next, I added onions and chard, sauteed in white wine. To simulate cheese, I flavored some Toffutti with garlic and basil and dropped spoonfuls onto the pizza. Then came the thickly sliced Roma tomatoes.
For this pizza I wanted to use broccoli and what better to go with broccoli than olives and garlic. In the preping stages, I chopped a whole can of olives in my mini cuisinart chopper, as well as some garlic. I lightly steamed the broccoli before adding it to the pizza.
Don't forget to season your pizza before putting it in the oven!
I prefer to cook my pizzas on a pizza stone in a 500 degree oven. With a stone and a hot oven, the pizzas always cook fast and evenly!
Last night I made this pizza. It is a vegetarian pizza with a peanut pesto, eggplant, olives, grape tomatoes and sauteed red onions and broccoli. Not only delicious, one of the most colorful and beautiful pizzas I've made. I've made plenty of pizzas between the last blogged about pizza and this one, however I think I'm finally getting the dough just right. This time I had little trouble transferring the pizza from the cutting board to the pizza stone in the oven. Below, I packaged up some slices on Mel's pizza plates.
This is pizza is: sun-dried tomato tapenade with ricotta cheese, pepperoni and sauteed onions and tomatoes in regular and white balsamic vinegar and wine. I've got to find a better way to transfer these pizzas from my work surface to the pizza stone in the oven. Some of the crust came unrolled on part of this pizza. The end result is that where it unraveled, the crust was dry. On the other half that didn't unroll, the oils from the tapenade seeped into the crust and kept it oily and moist.
I'm not sure what to name this pizza, exactly. I don't think that the above title really gives this pizza due justice. The crust is a run of the mill yeast dough with some added spices (garlic, cloves, pepper and cayenne). The pesto is an arugula pesto with the usual ingredients (arugula, cashews, garlic, salt, pepper, lemon, white balsamic vinegar) that I mixed with dijon mustard before spreading onto the dough. I actually added too much dijon, so I mellowed it out with some splenda and more white balsamic vinegar.
Next are yellow onions and roasted jalepenos sauteed in white whine. Italian sausage and pineapple finish off the top layer. I wanted to use tofutti as well, but the stuff in the fridge went bad, so I defrosted and drained some soft tofu and put it in my cuisinart chopper. I pureed it until it was smooth and added flavors to try to mimic cheese, specifically ricotta. Why ricotta, well Mel told me since the tofu had been frozen, that it wouldn't come out smooth. Wrong.
Despite some difficulty getting this pizza off the cutting board and onto the stone in the oven, it came out really well. Also, the tofu and egg helped bring together other ingredients and give the effect of having cheese. 
Most pizza dough calls for sugar. I try not to add sugar whenever possible, however I do know that sugar is supposed to help the yeast work. So instead of using sugar, I put a drop of honey it it. I also added ground black pepper and ground chili to the crust. After I rolled it out, I 
One of the reasons I decided to make this pizza was because I had a bunch of beef knuckle steak meat, that I had mistakenly bought. In the dinner I made the night before (raviolis), I had added meat to the menu, and I basically used half of each steak to make meat rolls. Doesn't sound appetizing, I know, but they were really good. With the left over beef, I diced it, seasoned it with salt, pepper and drided chilis (ground) and then browned them in a rum infused oil (something Mel created by mistake) and added diced onions. After that, I added diced jalepenos because I thought the pizza needed more color. Made it taste great too. And later after the pizza came out of the oven, i added lemon zest and a squeeze of a lemon to the pizza, further enhancing the flavors. With this pizza, I felt that I redeemed myself because the last few pizzas I made, didn't live up to my expectations. You are your hardest critic...
Another pesto pizza. Mel and I try not to eat to much dairy, so I'm really into making cheese-less pizzas. The pesto is a Arugula-Spinach pesto. For the toppings I used peppered salami, tomatoes, garlic, red onions, sweet peppers and parsley. The dough didn't rise as much as I had hoped and it came out kinda dry. It seems that if I am using freshly made pesto, then I need to coat the pizza pretty good because it looses a lot of moisture while it is in the oven. Also, I think I will start letting the dough rest longer before rolling it out. The recipe I use says to let it rest/rise for at least 30 minutes, however if I let it rise for longer, the crust rises more in the oven.
I made this pizza last Friday night. I made the dough early to see if I let it rise longer, would it come our thicker. Well sort of what I had in mind. Anyway, at the time, Mel and I had still not gone shopping so, I just through this together. I used arugula pesto that I had in the freezer (this works great because of the oil content, it does not completely freeze, so you can use it anytime without the hassel of thawing), roasted jalepenos, leftover onions from camping, minced garlic, tomatoes from our plants, and canned pineapple that was being saved for.. Pizza! awesome. I used one ring of pineapple from the can and put the rest in the freezor and I made ice cubes from the juice in the can. These will be great the next time we had Kool-Aid!
