Gluten-Free Pizza Crust

Whenever The Newfield Street Kitchen hits a landmark number of posts - usually a multiple of 500 - I email a core group of my friends to thank them for their support of my project. Sometimes I include a list of recent past posts as well as a list of upcoming future posts. However, I always ask for special requests, as I am always looking to do something that will get read. Sure enough, a good friend of mine (let’s call him Steve) responded to my last email with a very specific request: he was going gluten-free and wanted to see what I could do with a gluten-free pizza crust.

The Research

I seriously cheated on my research for this project. Normally, I would start with a search on my Eat Your Books account to see what popped up in the indexed cookbooks in my personal library and in the indexed blogs that I follow. I’d poke into a few of those recipes to see whether any of them struck my fancy. Then I would search Epicurious to see what they had to offer, and figure out whether I was happy with any of the possibilities. Finally, I’d look across the set that I was happy with to winnow the results to maybe two or three options.

I didn’t do any of that because I didn’t want to risk wasting my time on unfruitful experiments. Instead, I simply consulted my network: a really good friend in the Pacific Northwest (let’s call her Toshka) is gluten-free, and my best friend Bea has compiled numerous gluten-free recipes from all sorts of sources for her sister. Text messages were sent to request any/all gluten-free pizza crust recipes that they were happy with.

Toshka promptly replied that she had one recipe that she both trusted and loved, but I’d need to wait one while she found it. A bit later, she sent me a photo of the recipe. I couldn’t read it on my phone, but I had no problem reading it on my laptop. The recipe seemed a bit odd - predominantly cheese and almond flour - but Toshka wrote that she liked it enough to eat it plain as breadsticks. Since she and I had texted enough for me to know that we were on the same wavelength, I was going to trust her recommendation and give it a go.

Bea and I talked at the office the next day. She wasn’t sure what was in their compendium, but would look into it. Sure enough, Bea scrubbed their collection for something worthwhile; finding nothing satisfactory, she then combed her Internet resources. She even looked into the AllRecipes site, which is a site to which anyone can contribute. That frightens me, so I stay away from it. Bea, however, knows which contributors are good and is willing to invest the time into critically reading the recipes and their comments, so she often finds really good stuff on the site. Unfortunately, within the time constraints of her life, Bea wasn’t able to find any recipes to recommend to me. But I had Toshka’s recommendation, so the experiment was still a go!

The Execution

Although I immediately accepted Steve’s challenge and queried the ladies for their recipes, it took me about two months to work the execution of Toshka’s recipe onto my calendar; a lot of planned travel, and a lot of unplanned illness, interfered with my time in the kitchen. Finally, when fatigue interfered with my plans to go back out gallivanting for Independent Bookstore Day, I buckled down and did the necessary grocery shopping. Since I hadn’t checked the recipe before my shopping, I bought excessive amounts of both mozzarella cheese and almond flour, but no cream cheese or eggs. Fortunately, I had uses in mind for my excess purchases and had found both (unexpired) cream cheese and eggs in my refrigerator when I cleaned it. (Apparently, I had been planning to make a cheesecake that never happened!)

Right off the bat, I encountered a problem with Toshka’s recipe. The second step called for microwaving the mozzarella and the cream cheese together in a medium sized microwaveable bowl. I don’t have a microwave! Fortunately, reading through the entire recipe, it looked like I could probably substitute melting the cheeses together in a medium sized saucepan on the stove. So that’s what I was going to do!

I had envisioned that the mozzarella would melt smoothly in the bottom of the pan, almost like butter does. That’s not what happened! First, I measured two ounces of cream cheese into my large saucepan, which I had over medium-low heat. Of course, the cream cheese didn’t melt; it just sizzled. So I quickly measured one cup of mozzarella into the pot in hopes that would stop the sizzling. It didn’t. I quickly stirred the two cheeses together into a ball on the side of the pot while I measured an additional one-half cup of mozzarella into the pot (actually, it was more like three-quarters cup). That just made a bigger ball in the pot. So I stirred it all with a metal butter knife until the ball looked stretchy and there were no obvious large lumps of cream cheese. At that point I removed the pot from the heat, and turned off the burner.

When I added the three-quarters cup almond flour (which was more like one full cup), it just sat on the cheese ball. Whereas the cheeseball seemed to form in the pot in no time, it felt like it took forever to incorporate the almond flour into the ball. Then again, I was still using the metal butter knife. It might have gone faster if I used a broader wooden spatula.

The egg was the last ingredient to go into the mix. That too just sat separately at first, and took a lot of work to incorporate into the ball. But eventually I got it so that there was no trace of either the egg or the almond flour in the pot. Being half-Italian, I put my hand into the pot to knead the dough in order to smooth it out some more. That was a mistake! All I got was a hand covered in super sticky dough. But at least I knew not to try to touch it any more…

After I washed my sticky hand, I eased the dough out onto a piece of parchment paper sprayed with olive oil, which was sitting on a stoneware pizza baker. I carefully used the knife to coax it into a somewhat circular shape. It was much smaller and ragged than I expected from the picture that accompanied Toshka’s recipe. But I decided to go with it rather than fight to spread it more thinly. I skipped poking holes into the dough (allegedly to prevent bubbles) and sprinkling with garlic powder, onion powder, and mixed herbs (because I forgot), and I popped it straight into a 425F oven.

Per the instructions, I baked the dough for eight minutes and then checked it for large bubbles. There weren’t any, so I put it back in for another six minutes for a total of fourteen minutes, which was the maximum cook time in the recipe. The crust was nicely browned when I pulled it out of the oven, so I was pretty confident that it was done enough to be topped with sauce, more mozzarella, and some freeze-dried basil. Since all that the recipe said was “Bake until golden and crispy,” I gave it another ten minutes in the oven. That’s about what I usually give my traditional pizzas to melt the toppings. After the ten-minute timer barked, I pulled out the pizza, turned off the oven, and set another ten-minute timer to let it cool.

The Verdict

I was fairly pleased that the baking pizza made my kitchen smell good, but I was still a little concerned about how it tasted. My concern only grew when the crust didn’t snap when I cut it with big chef’s knife. Then again, the last pizzas that I had cut were the ones coming out of my dad’s special outdoor propane-fueled pizza oven. Those definitely were crisp enough to snap when cut! Of course, when I dove in and tried a bit of the naked crust, it was good. It wasn’t yeasty and airy and crispy like traditional pizza dough, but it wasn’t soggy and mushy either. It handled my toppings well, which was a bonus because I tend to oversauce my pizza.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by how easy Toshka’s gluten free pizza recipe was to prepare, and by how good it tasted. While this recipe will probably not replace the traditional family pizza ought recipe or our new favorite from Serious Eats that I tested a few years ago, it is definitely something that I would not be embarrassed to whip up as an appetizer at a dinner party. And I’m optimistic that the leftovers will hold up well enough so that I don’t have to stress over breakfast tomorrow morning.