How to really make (vegan) pizza

I just got finished cleaning up most of the mess from a wonderful night.  I threw a dual birthday party for my friends Lauren and Grant.  Here are oldish pictures of their beautiful faces:

We had homemade vegan pizza. It was the best vegan pizza I’ve ever had. Here’s the secret:

Screw the cheese.

Seriously. People try to make vegan pizza by using vegan “cheese”. But let’s be honest here. Vegan “cheese” tastes like crap. So you should just leave it off. If you leave the cheese off a pizza you’re left with something pretty bland, so here’s what you do:

Make delicious sauces.

That’s the secret. Basically, make a sauce that is so tasty that you could just dip fresh baked bread in it and that, in and of itself, would be a complete, delicious meal. For tonight’s meal I made three sauces.  They all turned out amazingly good.  Seriously, putting cheese on these sauces would actually detract from them.

White sauce

Put a big blop of Earth Balance in a saucepan over medium heat. Let it melt, then add flour until it starts to stick together. Brown that concoction (called a “rue” <b>update:</b> Leif informs us that this is spelled “roux” but pronounced the way I spelled it.) for a while. Slowly start adding water while stirring/whisking until it’s the thickness of a white sauce. Add a healthy dump of nutritional yeast, more minced garlic than you’re comfortable with, and a handful of minced fresh basil. Cook a bit more, and then dump the sauce in the food processor with a package of drained silken tofu. Add a sprinkle of salt and then puree. Add more of the various ingredients until the taste is perfectly balanced.

Cilantro Pesto

Throw 6 or so cloves of garlic in the food processor. Rinse one bunch of cilantro (you’re gonna need three eventually) and chop off the very bottoms, keeping the stems and leaves. Add those to the food processor. Add a handful of nutritional yeast, a sprinkle of salt, a good pour of olive oil, and a handful of pine nuts. Puree until smooth. Add the other two bunches of cilantro and puree until smooth again. Add a box of firm tofu and pulse until the tofu is fine grains (like parmesan). Add more stuff (olive oil, salt, tofu, nut. yeast, etc) until it tastes good.

Sorta Puttanesca Sauce

Chop and saute a yellow onion. Start toasting a cup or two of pine nuts.  You toast things like this by putting them in a dry pan over medium heat and stirring periodically. Add to the onion more cloves of minced garlic than you’re comfortable with, and saute briefly. Dump in a 32 oz can of crushed tomatoes and another 32 ouncer of diced tomatoes. Add a handful of minced fresh basil. Mash the pine nuts with your mortar and pestle and add them. Add minced kalamata olives until it starts tasting nicely olivey. Add salt to taste.

And then I made some fresh dough…

Pizza dough

Put 3 cups of bread flour in the food processor. Add one packet (or a little less than a tablespoon) of yeast and 1 tablespoon salt. Turn on the food processor and then start slowly pouring water in. You’ll see the mixture change from fine grains to crumbles to clumps, and then eventually it will form one big clump that starts violently smashing around in your food processor. Add just a little bit more and let it process for five minutes or so. I like to make the dough pretty wet, so it’s soft and sticky and hard to get out of the food processor. Before you turn the food processor off, pour some olive oil in the bottom of a big bowl (at least 2x the size of your dough). Put your dough in there, and swish it around so the oil gets all the way up the sides. Cover with a towel and leave it in a warm place. When it doubles in volume, punch it down, knead it a bit and let it rise again. Punch it down again and let it rise a third time. Now you can form it into shells.

And by our powers combined…

The most amazing vegan pizza ever

Form your dough into shells as thin as you can manage. Sprinkle a LOT of cornmeal onto a pizza peel or cookie sheet with no edges, or inverted cookie sheet with edges. Get the pizza on there and give the pan a jiggle to make sure the pizza can move around freely. If it’s sticking anywhere, add more cornmeal underneath. This is easy now, but it will be HARD when the toppings are on. Add one or more of the sauces and veggies (the pesto with veggies and the white sauce on top is pretty killer). sprinkle with olive oil (get the crust!), salt and fresh cracked pepper. Slide the pizza onto a hot stone in the hottest oven you can muster. Cook until done (6ish minutes… depends on your oven) Pull it out and let it cool on a rack for a bit before cutting (makes it crispier!)  Here are some pizza ideas:

• Cilantro Pesto with black beans, tomatoes, and onions (thanks Aver’s!)
• White sauce with soaked sun dried tomatoes, spinach, and artichoke hearts
• Puttanesca sauce with mushrooms, peppers, and roasted eggplant*

The above recipes, with the dough tripled, fed 20 people, with leftover sauce.  The sauces are very hearty and proteiny, so people WILL fill up, despite their expectations.

* slice the eggplant thin, coat with olive oil, sprinkle a little salt and pepper and roast it in the oven until it’s browned, flip ‘em and brown the other side.