Vegan Pizza

I think that I mentioned before, that one of my favorite childhood memories is making pizza with my Dad every Saurday night as a child. With three girls it was too expensive to buy pizza, and much more fun to make it. My Dad would make the crust from scratch, and then stretch it onto one of several circular pans. He would help us spread out the sauce, layer it with cheese and toppings, and put it into the oven.

As adult vegans, Brian and I have tried to keep up the tradition of making pizza. There are places in town where we could order vegan pizza, but it tastes better when we make it. The first thing we do is make the crust in our bread machine. Our bread machine is the best Christmas present ever, since I use it weekly throughout the fall and winter. Just drop the ingredients in, set the cycle and boom, an hour later we have pizza dough. I spread the dough on our circular pan, and bake it for about fifteen minutes. Then I slide it off the pan and onto a cutting board to cool (and also so I can bake the second shell...we only have one pizza pan...)



While it's cooling, we make the cheese in our food processor. After being vegan for several years, I find that I enjoy nut cheeses more than I ever did real cheese. The nut flavor it much more satisfying that the rich flavor cheese had. Plus it's such fun to make! The recipe we use (found here) my friend Estella gave to me, and it's both delicious and works pretty well for pizza. It has red pepper in it, and that give it a unique and tasty flavor. You have to glop it on and be careful not to mix it with the sauce too much, but mmmmm it's worth it once it's baked.



After putting the sauce and 'cheese' on, we move on to the toppings. I *love* pineapple and olives on my pizza, so we always do a pineapple/olive pizza, and we had some fresh mushrooms so we did a mushroom/olive one too. We need to get more creative with this, I've been planning to try a bbq tofu pizza for a while now.



The picture above is before cooking. The 'cheese' tends to darken and thicken when you cook it. Below is the pineapple/olive pizza after it's been cooked. And partly eaten...I wasn't quick enough with my camera to catch it before we ate some of it.