Good Food : Pizza

08/23/09

We've been eating a lot of good stuff lately. One thing that's been particularly fun to do is go and get the fixings to make a pizza. Now, not allowing any cheese or oil in your diet can make this a challenge, but if you know what to shop for it ends up being pretty easy.

Here's what we do:

Crust
There's two routes here, and the most obvious is to make your own. There are some recipes for this on the low fat veggie archive that look great, but they'll take time to make. On the flip side there's a company out of Dallas called the Dallas Gourmet Bakery that makes oil free pizza crusts in of both bleached and whole wheat flour marketed under the "Kabuli" brand. We find them at our local Whole Foods market. They're a thicker pizza crust, so if you're a thin crust person making your own is the best bet (as always).

Sauce
Most commercial pizza sauce has oil, typically olive oil, mixed into it. Instead of using one of those we'll do one of two things. Once in a while we'll use an oil-free spaghetti sauce and reduce it over heat to thicken it up. It's easy to do, but it is time consuming. More typically we'll mix a can of diced tomatoes (Muir Glen has some great roasted mixes) in with a can of tomato paste. This makes a nice thick pizza sauce.

Toppings
This is the easy part, just get what you like. We typically use onions (red and yellow), mushrooms, bell peppers, and pineapple. There's lots of other things you can do here with other vegetables, herbs, grains, etc. Knock yourself out.

The result is a no oil, veggie pizza loaded with yummy toppings that ends up being very VERY filling.