Another Gluten Free Pizza

As I've several longer-term sewing projects that can't be posted for a while I might be posting some other things besides sewing for a while.

Recently one of my friends posted a recipe to my fb wall.  It was a version of a recipe i had read before, but this time the timing was right and I decided to give it a shot.  It's for a gluten free pizza crust made of cauliflower. Nutty, right? We decided to give it a shot.

To start, I ground an entire head of cauliflower up in the blender.  Yes, I'm sure a food processor would have been 'better' but ours is small and frankly we have no space for a larger one.  We have a great blender and it worked just fine. 

Next the ground cauliflower gets cooked briefly in some boiling water, strained off, and set aside to cool.

After cooling I squeezed as much of  the water out as I could.  Amazing how a whole head of cauliflower can be compressed down to about the size of a small fist.

After straining the cauliflower is nice and dry and a little crumbly.  Also, it smells really good. :)

Then I measured out the ricotta, grabbed an egg (room temp), & mixed it all together.  The original recipe calls for goat cheese but ricotta fits our budget better and has similar moisture content.

Shaping it was pretty easy and quick.  Regular gluten free 'dough' can often be frustrating to shape for a pizza crust, but this was super easy to make a fairly evenly thin round with a little edge around the outside.

After baking:

It was ready for toppings. I put a layer of sauce (tomato paste, tomato juice, spices, garlic, salt), sprinkled on some thawed out spinach, and layered on the pepperoni. 

Then I covered it all in a mixture of mozzerella and hard cheeses.

I forgot to get a pic before we sliced and devoured half of the pizza, but it was all melty and yummy.

So what's the verdict? "Needs tweaking." 

Flavor was good, but still doesn't crisp up or hold together quite like a pizza crust should.  Possible additions: a little corn flour underneath for that distinctive pizza crust flavor, a little starch of some sort mixed in with the cauliflower, something (not sure what yet) to help the crust crisp up better.  I'd also love to figure out a version of the crust that doesn't include cheese so I could share it with my lactose intolerant and/ or vegan friends and family.

With a few pizza toppings left (but no more cauliflower) the next night my husband made some tortillas and made tortilla pizzas out of them.  Totally yummy and super easy.  As much as the cauliflower crust was good, (and I still want to try to tweak the recipe) we have homemade tortillas several times a week so it's much more likely, for time considerations, that we would just have these more often.

Thank you, dear!

Happy Monday!