Pizza, Pizza

My sister wanted to make pizza for few of her friends, so I said let's try it out ahead of time to see how it goes.

For the base we used a sangak bread which is a Persian national bread.  It is basically whole wheat flour, water and yeast with sesame seeds on top right before baking.  It's kind of fun to watch them make it at our local store.  It's a very wet dough and is pretty much poured on the hot grill.  It's about three feet long, 14 inches wide and works great for pizza.  This is what I used, but you can use any whole wheat, oil free pizza dough you would like.

We made two different kinds.  The top one is a roasted tomato sauce with grilled veggies.  For the second one we call it sausage and onion.

For the roasted tomato sauce, roast the tomatoes as I showed you on my previous post a couple of days ago, along with the onions and garlic.  Put it all in a Cuisinart or blender and whir it up.  Use about a cup and a half of the sauce and to it add 1 tsp. crushed red pepper (more if you like it spicy), and s&p to taste.  Pour the sauce and cover the bread leaving about an inch around the edges with no sauce.  We grilled up some zucchini, yellow squash, red, yellow and orange bell peppers and eggplant.  At the end add sliced black olives.  Put it on a sheet pan lined with silpat (previous post) or parchment paper, or a pizza stone if you have one.  Put it in a 500 ° preheated oven for about 5 minutes.  Just keep an eye on it.  It's done when the edges start to look dark brown or black.

For the second one I took no fat meat crumbles (you can use TVP textured Vegetable Protein if you can't find the ready made crumbles.  Just rehydrate it with equal parts hot water to TVP) and to the crumbles added 1 tablespoon no beef bouillon, 1 tablespoon Vegan Worcestershire, 2 tablespoons fennel seed, half crushed, half whole, 1 tablespoon dry rosemary crushed, 1 tablespoon tomato paste, 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper.  Heat all of it in a non stick pan.  Put about 6 large handfuls of spinach in it and add 1/2 cup water.  Cover so the spinach will cook down.  Once it's all cooked down, stir it up and you're ready to go.

For the pizza we made a cashew cheeze sauce using 1 cup cashews, ground fine, the juice of 2 lemons, 1 cup of basil firmly packed, 1/2 cup of the extra roasted tomato sauce.  Blend this all in your Cuisinart or blender (taste for S&P)  and you're ready to go.

The Cheeze is the base of the pizza  followed by the sausage mixture.  To that add grilled mushrooms, grilled onions sliced and rehydrated sundried tomatoes (rehydrate by putting the dry tomatoes in a cup of water in the microwave for one minute.  Let them soak about 5 minutes then thinly slice them).  Bake the same way as the vegetable pizza, 500° preheated oven about 5 minutes.

As an added feature, though I don't have any pictures of this, I added chopped kale mixed with one avocado and the juice of one lemon and 1/2 tsp of salt together.  Mix everything up with your hands (that's right, squish it all together). This is the topping that will go on the vegetable pizza when it comes out of the oven.

For the sausage pizza, take about 2 cups of arugula (rocket if you're from Europe) and squeeze the juice of one lemon on it with a little salt.  Put this on top of the pizza when it comes out of the oven.