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.

Fruit
1/8 c sugar
1 t cinnamon
10 peaches, sliced

Crumb Topping
1/2 c sugar
1/2 c flour
1/4 c Earth Balance
2 t cinnamon

Cream the butter and the sugar for the batter. Add the other dry ingredients and mix well. Add the soy milk and mix lightly.

Combine the dry ingredients for the crumb topping. Add the butter and “cut” it into the dry mixture with two spoons, slicing the butter and stirring continuously until it forms a relatively even crumbly mess.

Set the oven to 375. Toss the fruit with the sugar and cinnamon. Grease a 9×13 glass casserole. Pour the batter into the casserole, add the fruit, and sprinkle with the crumb topping. Bake at 375 for 50 minutes.

We made 20 different recipes of pancake, varying basic proportions, auditioning potential “secret” ingredients, and having a gay old time. Here are our findings, with the final recipe at the bottom. And yes, there were spreadsheets involved.

Oil vs. Earth Balance

We tried both, multiple times, and the difference was one of the most striking of the afternoon. Canola oil pancakes taste like crap, and Earth Balance pancakes are delicious. Don’t use canola oil, period. Other oils, like coconut, might work, but we didn’t try them. Let us know if you try something else and it works out.

Cutting the fat

Melting down your earth balance and mixing it into the dry ingredients provides a good flavor, but if you want a really amazing texture, just spoon the cold earth balance right into the dry stuff, and then “cut” it in. Traditionally, cutting fat into a flour mix is done with two knives, but we found that just squishing the earth into the flour worked great. Squish until you get a relatively homogeneous crumbly mixture.

It should be noted that you can make a pretty good pancake with no fat besides what is naturally in the banana and what you use to fry it. Not quite decadent, but certainly delicious.

Rising action

Recipes on the web vary wildly in the amount of baking powder they recommend, from less than a teaspoon per cup to up to two tablespoons (6 teaspoons) per cup. We found that for white flour, about one tablespoon of baking powder per cup of flour works well, yielding an extremely fluffy pancake with only a slight baking powder taste, which can be masked by other flavors.

A good fluffy pancake will actually visibly puff up when you flip it over, yielding a lovely dome shape like the one you see in the photo. Going down to two teaspoons per cup of flour yielded a soggier, denser pancake.

For whole wheat flour, we upped it to 4 teaspoons of baking powder per cup of flour. Whole wheat flour is less fluffy to begin with, so you might want to compensate.

We also tried using half baking powder, half baking soda, since we’d seen that on a few recipes, but that only seemed to create a nasty pretzel pancake thing. It certainly didn’t improve the leavening action.

The glue

Traditional pancakes have eggs, which not only provide protein, flavor and leavening (rising), they act as the glue that binds everything together. We found that the best way to achieve a great fluffy pancake that isn’t too crumbly was to add two teaspoons of mushed banana for every cup of flour, and if you’re using whole wheat flour, to add in an additional 1/2 teaspoon of corn starch (or any other starch) to provide additional binding. The banana taste is noticeable, but it works well with syrups and other fruits, and the texture is just great.

Egg replacers like Ener-G work too, but they are are basically just starch, baking powder, and flour. You’ve already got baking powder and flour in your pancake recipe, so all you’re really doing is adding some potato starch or something. We’re pretty sure in the case of pancakes, corn starch and Ener-G will be basically equivalent. That said, we didn’t spend the money on a huge box of the stuff just so we could try it out. Let us know if you do.

Wetness

The wetness of the batter makes a huge difference in the quality of the pancake. Too much liquid, and your pancake will be dense and thin. Too little liquid and the pancake will be thick and dry. You’ve got to be like Goldilocks and find the porridge that’s just right.

The correct amount of liquid seems to be about the same as the amount of flour. One cup flour, one cup water. However, you might need a little less if you are adding banana or applesauce. We recommend adding the liquid slowly, whilst stirring, and monitoring the consistency carefully. You want a batter that will spread out to a round puddle about 1/4″ thick. If you tip the bowl, such a batter will slide freely and quickly off the walls of the bowl, leaving a thin layer of batter behind, but there should be some batter that slides down the bottom of the wall more slowly.

Bananas and apple and yams, oh my!

As we mentioned above, we really like what bananas do for vegan pancakes, especially the whole wheat ones. But we also tried adding applesauce and mushed cooked yams (in both cases, 2 teaspoons per cup of flour). The applesauce pancakes were good, but you sort of lose that wheaty pancake taste. I’d rather have regular pancakes with a sweet, cinnamon apple topping.

The yam pancakes were very good. If you want a heartier, more filling pancake that’s still sweet and fluffy, this is the pancake for you. Just microwave, bake, or boil the yam until it is soft, and then mash it with a fork. After you’ve cut the earth balance into the dry ingredients, add the yam and knead it into a dry dough. Then add water slowly until you get the right batter consistency.

Got milk?

Many vegan pancake recipes suggest using soy milk or other alternative milks. We tried both soy and oat milk, and it didn’t seem to matter. Water was just as tasty. Unless you really want the 1/4 gram of protein, you might as well save your money and use water.

Salt ‘n Suga’

Added salt seems unnecessary. Baking powder is already a little salty. We did like the sweetness a little sugar imparts, especially in the whole wheat pancakes which are prone to blandness, but if you’re using a banana you can get away without using sugar.

The Recipe

Proto-Ultimate Vegan Pancakes

(Makes 12 eight-inch pancakes)

These are the result of strenuous testing, but we’re open to suggestions for improvement. Post a comment if you think you’ve got a variation that beats these.

• 3 cups flour (white works well, but half whole wheat, half barley is a delicious alternative)
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 4 Tbsp baking powder
• 2 Tbsp corn starch (if using whole wheat flour)
• 1/4 cup Earth Balance, plus 1/8 cup for frying
• 1 banana, mashed
• 3 cups or less water

Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add 1/4 cup cold Earth Balance, and cut it into the mixture using your fingers. When the mixture is uniformly crumbly, add the mashed banana and knead it in. Put a large, flat bottom skillet or griddle on medium-high heat. It’s hot enough when water dribbled on the pan sizzles. Add the water to the banana mix slowly, until the desired consistency is reached. (See “Wetness” above). For each pancake, put about 1/2 teaspoon of Earth Balance in the middle of the pan. When it has melted, pour 1/2 cup of batter slowly into the center of the Earth Balance puddle. When the bottom of the pancake is browned, but the top is still wet, flip it. When the other side is browned, which will take less time, remove it from the heat.

Serve immediately! Don’t stack pancakes in the oven, put them on a plate and tell someone to start eating. The crispy, fluffy texture is best fresh off the griddle.

Variations: Substitute cooked, mashed yam for the banana. Make sure you incorporate the yam with the flour well before adding liquid. Or, add applesauce, cinnamon, and nutmeg for an apple pie taste.

Open Questions

Even after an afternoon of pancakery, there are still some things we didn’t get to test; some questions left unanswered. Like, since most baking powder is double-acting, would it make sense to let the batter sit and froth up, and then gently ladle it onto the pan for a second rise? If we did that, could we get away with less baking powder? And, my mom informed me last night that baking powder needs an acidic environment to react. Should we try adding some lemon juice or vinegar with the baking powder? And what about that no-fat-inside pancake? Was it really that good? What would vanilla add to the flavor, and exactly what happens when you cook a pancake on lower heat for longer? What about the liquid/flour proportions? Do you really need to eyeball it every time you make the batter, or can we construct a recipe that Just. Works. Every. Time? Katt says corn oil tastes great… what other oils work well, and how do they stand up to venerable Earth Balance?

Lots of questions. Perhaps a second edition of pancake VTK is needed.