Unbelievable Cauliflower Pizza

I just did a whole huge post on things to do with cauliflower, but this pizza really warrants its own section. If you are doing low carb or no carb, or eating anything at all - it doesn't matter. This is deeeeelicious!

The premise is that you use cauliflower for the crust and top the pizza with whatever you want. But we'll get into that later. First the crust.

Crust

1 cup cooked and thoroughly mashed up cauliflower (make sure to salt your cauliflower when you cook it)
1 egg
1 cup grated whole milk mozzarella cheese
salt, pepper, oregano, fennel seed, parsley - whatever you want to flavor the crust

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Heavily grease a baking sheet, or line a sheet pan with parchment and grease that. This crust has a tendency to stick. 

Mix the cauliflower, egg and cheese, as well as the spices. With this mixture, make a nice flat circle on your greasy pan. Try and get it even - not too thin and not too thick. It'll probably be the size of a dinner plate.

Now place the to-be crust in your very hot oven and bake for 20-25 minutes. It should be nice and brown, but not burned.

Remove and let it sit for a second, then either take it off the parchment or run a flat spatula under the crust to loosen it from the pan.

Now for the toppings. 

You can use a jarred sauce, I suppose. But really - yack.

So you can make an awesome tomato sauce  and use leftovers for more pizzas or whatever. Here's what I do:

1 can of really good tomatoes - with or without basil. If you want, get the fire roasted kind.
3-4 cloves of garlic
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground pepper
1 tsp dried oregano, crushed in the palm of your hand

Put all that in the blender and whir it to a pulp. That's it.

Put several spoonfuls of this (or other) sauce on your pizza crust.

Top with things like 

Pepperoni slices
Cooked sausage
Cooked bacon
Cooked chicken
Fried tofu
Anchovies

Green and/or red bell pepper slices
Olives
Zucchini - finely diced
Onion - thinly siced

... and so forth. Main thing is that your meats are cooked. Veggies should be fast-cooking or pre-sauteed.

Top your creation with grated cheese - whatever cheese you like:

Cheddar
Parmesan
More Mozzarella
Pepper Jack

And now put this loveliness under the BROILER. Keep a close watch on it. Broilers can get pretty vicious by burning your food in seconds. Depending on your broiler, this last step can take between 5-10 minutes. You want your cheese to be nice and melty, and perhaps also browned.

Let the whole thing sit for a minute to set, and then cut in pizza slices. This is even good the next day, cold out of the fridge.

I served it to someone that way once: "Hey, do you want a slice of cold pizza?"  - "Hell, yeah!"
They ate and I asked if they noticed anything - no, they said, it was delicious! And then I revealed that the crust was cauliflower - they did not believe me.

So you see, another magic cauliflower trick! 

 

Two Years Later...

Meanwhile I have found a new way of making cauliflower crust  that involves not using cheese. There's really only so much cheese I'd like to eat during one sitting, and since cheese is used for the topping, I came up with this solution for the crust:

2 cups of cooked, pureed cauliflower (works best in the food processor)

2 eggs

3/4 cup flax seed meal

1 tsp salt

Spices of your choosing - I just used garlic powder, aleppo pepper, and black pepper

Heat oven to 500 degrees.

Combine all ingredients - preferably in the food processor. Liberally oil a baking sheet (I use coconut oil). Make two disks of the cauliflower batter - take your time to spread it evenly so it won't burn by being too thin in places.

Bake for approximately 10-15 minutes - keep an eye on it. You want the edges to be dark brown and the center to be light brown.

Remove from oven and turn the oven to "broil". Carefully loosen the crust from the baking sheet with an offset spatula or a thin, long knife.  

Top as described above and pop the crusts under the broiler until everything looks to your liking.

Personally, I like this crust better. It is nutty and gets crispier. Give it a try and let me know how it goes!