Those of you who know me know that, whenever possible, I like to make things from scratch. I have good reasons for this. First, I love cooking. Second, making my food from scratch allows me to control what goes into it, meaning that I can eat healthy while eating the things that I love.
Sometimes, however, making it from scratch just isn't in the cards.
This was one of those times. I recently had some people over for an onion chopping party (preparation to cater a weekend's worth of food for 25+ people, but that's a different story), and decided (like any sane person in need of a lot of assistance) that bribery was going to win me the most help. The bribery food of choice was obvious: pizza, beloved of college students everywhere.
Brilliant eh?
Enter the wrench: gluten intolerance.
My first thought was that it's an easy fix...I'll just google a gluten free pizza crust recipe, buy the requisite ingredients, and continue with my homemade pizza plans. So I googled, and I found plenty of recipes, but buy the ingredients I did not.
You see, gluten the part of wheat flour that makes it sticky and elastic...it's the reason that you don't want to overmix muffins (you don't want the gluten to develop and makes the muffins tough), and it's also the reason that breads containing yeast are able to rise: the carbon dioxide produced by the yeast is trapped by the network of gluten in the dough. If this gluten network were not present the bread would not rise, which brings me back to the pizza crust issue. If you recall from a long-ago blog post, pizza dough is one of those things that needs to sit and rise before it can be baked (this gives pizza dough it's texture). Making a gluten free pizza dough, then, requires adding ingredients that can compensate for what gluten free flour lacks; ingredients like xanthan gum, agar, gelatin, potato starch, and tapioca flour...ingredients that can give dough a sticky and elastic texture.
Also...ingredients that can be expensive and hard to find.
I live in a large city, so I will admit that finding the ingredients wasn't the issue...their price was. Xanthan gum, for example, costs nearly $14 for half a pound, and you only need 1 tsp for the recipe. Not worth it for someone like myself who does gluten free baking once in a blue moon.
So I threw my hands up in the air and decided that a from-scratch gluten free pizza crust was not going to happen. Then I went to the store...because a perfectly fantastic gluten free pizza crust mix exists.
Verdict: my gluten free pizza adventure went much more smoothly than my foray into veggie burgers. It's not the same as regular pizza dough...you spread it rather than rolling it to get it into the right shape, and you wet your hands to keep the dough from sticking to them rather than dunking your hands in flour. But the crust turned out well: was strong enough to hold up the toppings so that we could eat our pizza with our hands, and had a texture not dissimilar to a traditional thin crust pizza.
Sometimes, however, making it from scratch just isn't in the cards.
This was one of those times. I recently had some people over for an onion chopping party (preparation to cater a weekend's worth of food for 25+ people, but that's a different story), and decided (like any sane person in need of a lot of assistance) that bribery was going to win me the most help. The bribery food of choice was obvious: pizza, beloved of college students everywhere.
Brilliant eh?
Enter the wrench: gluten intolerance.
My first thought was that it's an easy fix...I'll just google a gluten free pizza crust recipe, buy the requisite ingredients, and continue with my homemade pizza plans. So I googled, and I found plenty of recipes, but buy the ingredients I did not.
You see, gluten the part of wheat flour that makes it sticky and elastic...it's the reason that you don't want to overmix muffins (you don't want the gluten to develop and makes the muffins tough), and it's also the reason that breads containing yeast are able to rise: the carbon dioxide produced by the yeast is trapped by the network of gluten in the dough. If this gluten network were not present the bread would not rise, which brings me back to the pizza crust issue. If you recall from a long-ago blog post, pizza dough is one of those things that needs to sit and rise before it can be baked (this gives pizza dough it's texture). Making a gluten free pizza dough, then, requires adding ingredients that can compensate for what gluten free flour lacks; ingredients like xanthan gum, agar, gelatin, potato starch, and tapioca flour...ingredients that can give dough a sticky and elastic texture.
Also...ingredients that can be expensive and hard to find.
I live in a large city, so I will admit that finding the ingredients wasn't the issue...their price was. Xanthan gum, for example, costs nearly $14 for half a pound, and you only need 1 tsp for the recipe. Not worth it for someone like myself who does gluten free baking once in a blue moon.
So I threw my hands up in the air and decided that a from-scratch gluten free pizza crust was not going to happen. Then I went to the store...because a perfectly fantastic gluten free pizza crust mix exists.
 |
| Gotta love Bob. |
I was especially happy that it turned out given that I made a small error in execution: according to the instructions the crust should have been blind baked (read: baked without toppings) before adding the sauce and cheese...but I did not do this. It all worked out. Lesson: making a "mistake" in the kitchen is not the end of the world!
Unfortunately I neglected to take a picture of the pizza that I created, but that is mostly because it was eaten very quickly by my dedicated onion choppers. They said it was quite delicious though.......
No comments:
Post a Comment