Pro-Soup Propaganda

Since I started my cleanse/eating anti-inflammatory foods I have missed a few things, one of them being pizza. I was looking for anti-inflammatory recipes online when I stumbled across The Detoxinista's blog. OH. MAN. Everything on her page looked GOOD. I ran through a few recipes and then I found a recipe for cauliflower pizza crust. It sounded so odd to me. How could you make a cruciferous vegetable resemble anything like delicious, crunchy, warm pizza crust? I am game for new recipes and crazy-sounding ideas, so I thought I'd try it. Jonathan was the ultimate one I was going to have to win over. I promised him that if he didn't like it that I would cook him a freezer pizza and I would eat mine.

I followed the recipe. I realized that my crust was going to be smaller than anticipated, so even if the pizza turned out delicious Jonathan was still going to have to eat some of his freezer pizza. I made the Detoxinista's avocado pesto to spread on the pizza. I was thinking it would go good with sun-dried tomatoes, caramelized onions, and herbed goat chevre. I was holding my breath.

Friends, my pizza was so gosh darn delicious!! Even Jonathan wished the pizza had been bigger because it was so good! I am so, so happy to share this recipe with y'all because I am sure you will love it! Thank you to the Detoxinista for such amazing recipes!

Her recipe comes thanks to Doris Choi. I changed the recipe just a little bit to accomodate what I had on hand.

4 cups raw cauliflower rice

1 egg

1/3 cup chevre

Pinch of salt

To make the cauliflower rice, pulse batches of raw cauliflower florets in a food processor until the grains are a rice-like size. (The original recipe calls for 4 cups cauliflower rice, which was 1.25 heads of cauliflower. Next time I will use both heads of cauliflower to make the crust bigger, which means I would add a bit more egg and chevre.)

Fill a pot with about an inch of water and boil the cauliflower rice for five minutes. Drain the rice into a strainer and then put into a clean dishtowel and squeeeeeeze the extra water out of it. 

To make the dough, put the cauliflower rice, egg, salt, and chevre into a bowl and mix with your hands. You want it really well mixed! Put the dough onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and flatten into a crust about 1/3" thick. Make a little wall of crust around the outside if you want.

Bake for 35-40 minutes at 400* or until golden brown.

Next, the fun part: toppings! Put the toppings on your pizza and then bake for another 5-10 minutes. Voila! Your pizza will come out delicious! It created believers out of both Jonathan and I as to how good a cauliflower pizza crust can be.

Just for fun, I ended up trying a quinoa crust a few nights after to see how the difference was and it was good, as well! Stay tuned until tomorrow for that recipe!