Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Cauliflower Crust Pizza

Let me start off my saying I have wanted to try this for years!  I have put it off and put it off because it sounded like so much trouble for "fake" pizza.   Well, I was at Target a few weeks ago and found pre-crumbled cauliflower so I grabbed it and tried it out with Cauliflower Cheese Sticks.  Those were really good.  So, I stepped it up.  I got an actual head of cauliflower and decided to try out the pizza tonight.
PS  The cheese measurements below are because I was really trying to be good, I would have LOVED to double all of it! :)
PSS  Pictures at the bottom.  I hate scrolling through pictures just to get to a recipe.


Ingredients:
Crust:
1 head of fresh cauliflower
1 egg, lightly beaten
¼ cup shredded mozzarella cheese
2 teaspoons minced garlic
1 teaspoon olive oil
½ teaspoon fine grain sea salt
½ teaspoon dried Italian herb seasoning
¼ teaspoon ground black pepper

Toppings:
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon mozzarella cheese
¼ cup diced onion (use more or less to liking)
Handful of fresh spinach leaves
4-6 sliced cherry tomatoes
Turkey Pepperoni 
2 tablespoons crumbled feta
1 tablespoon grated parmesan
1/2 tsp dried Italian herb seasoning
(that was all I had on hand but mushrooms and green bell pepper would be really good added also!)

Step 1:  Prepare your cauliflower (this can be done at any point, jsut allow time for steamed cauliflower to cool)
I used a whole head of cauliflower.  Remove the leaves, chop it up so it fits in a food processor.  Blend until it is pretty small, it is called cauliflower "rice"
Move that to a steamer, steam for 20 minutes.  Let cool.  This is super important, the first time I did this, I was prepared.  I didn't have time to let it cool.  And when I moved it to a cheese cloth to "drain" I totally burnt my hands!  When cauliflower rice is cool enough to handle, move to cheese cloth and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.  Get as much water out as you can so you don't have soggy pizza.

Step 2:
Ready for pizza?  I know I am!
Preheat oven to 375
Mix together prepared cauliflower rice with rest of crust ingredients.
Line a round cake pan with parchment paper sprayed with olive oil.  Spread the crust mixture into bottom of cake pan.
While crust is baking warm the topping olive oil and garlic to season the oil.  Don't burn the garlic, just heat until there is a nice garlic aroma to oil.  Turn off and keep to side.
Bake for about 25 minutes then flip out onto a clean sheet of parchment.
Spread just enough of the garlic olive oil on crust to cover.
Then add toppings.  This is the order I did mine.
1.  Mozzarella
2.  Onion
3.  Spinach
4.   Pepporni
5.  Tomatoes
6.  Feta
7.  Parmasean
8.  Italian Seasoning
Put back in oven until cheese starts to brown.

Enjoy!