Vegan - Gluten Free Pizza Pie Crust

 There's something very flattering about finding out that someone is gluten free, but only after having baked her a loaf of bread and learning that she ate every bit of the bread. There's something very flattering and very troubling, because at the same time she ate every bit of that loaf of bread, her belly rolled that night like an Alaskan fishing ship, and someone who has had stomach roll for months at a time, I know it would take a special kind of crumb and a lot of flavor in that crust, as well a lot of love in my heart to eat something that I knew would double me over.

Laura's not completely gluten free, when I make something that has gluten in it, I'll give her a piece of that at the same time I'll fill the rest of her plate with an attempted gluten-less rendition of what I've made. I do this with dishes with soy too, as when I made my vegan-gluten free fish(y like substance), I made some of the fish with an oyster and portabello mushroom based center for her, though I still used yuba sheets, with the nori sheets, to wrap around the mushroom center.

These Sunday dinner nights that have now gone on for a couple of months started off with a pizza, full of gluten – as I basically have, in the past, taken an olive oil bread recipe and let it ferment overnight, then rolled it out and stacked it so deep with ingredients that it was hard to find a spatula that wouldn't bend under the weight of a slice. (I like to try to find a fruit that I caramelize to put on my pizza. This started with a birthday party where I made several pizzas, in which I had figs from a CSA that were just on this side from going bad, I quartered them and put them in a pan with olive oil, brown sugar and some balsamic vinegar and fried the shit out of them until the structure of the figs started to break down, the sugar caramelized. The result, with some vegan cheese by a company called Dayia -which is becoming the only vegan cheese that is easy to find, was a delicious combination of salty, savory and sweet.) Though Laura has had my pizza several times, she requested that we finally try to make a gluten free version of the five story high pie.

The week leading up to the GF pizza night (by the way, people who have a sensitivity to gluten don't care for the term “glutard” to describe their affliction) I looked online to find a GF crust, and, not finding a recipe that didn't include eggs, decided to splice some recipes together and experiment with some old egg substitutes to find one that worked. Here's what I found with the recipe that I ended up using, it didn't matter what I used to substitute for the eggs, except for in the recipe where I used old, blackened bananas as an egg substitute. I'd never had a GF pizza before, but I ate at least every night leading up to Sunday night dinner, each one slightly different from the last one. We made four pizzas that night, using two different crusts, the only difference being what I used for the egg substitute. The crusts were spongy, yet crispy – couldn't tell that they were GF. The recipe, with annotations, is here:

Vegan – gluten free pizza crust

The oven should be preheated to 400 degrees

-1 cup of tapioca four

-¼ cup each brown rice flour and spelt flour

-1 ½ baking pouder

-1 tsp xanthan gum – this stuff is crazy expensive, though I'm sure that if you've done any sort of GF baking you've bought some of this. I bought some quite a while ago, and it lasts a long time. I've often wondered what would happen if I didn't use it in a recipe, the portion used is so little how much could it do? But I also have been too frightened every time I come to the mixing bowl to neglect putting it in.

-1 tsp salt – out of a paranoia of hypothyroidism from a lack of iodine in my diet after using nothing but sea salt in my diet, I've started using only iodized salt in my foods. Let your own hypocondriaism decide your salt choice.

-1/8 cup olive oil, plus more for the pan

-¼ tsp apple cider vinegar

Your choice – either ¼ cup silken tofu / or 1 Tbs flax seed mixed with 3 Tbs of warm water. Either way this is a wet ingredient and should be added when the wet ingredients are added to the dry.

-1 ½ tsp brown sugar

-maybe about 1tsp of yeast

Place these items in glass with 1 cup of warm water for proofing.

Mix together the flours and salt, xanthan gum and any other dry ingredients that are up on that list.

Add the liquids and mix. The mix will now be a sticky goo.

On a well oiled pizza pie pan, slop the goo into the center, pat down, and with oiled fingers spread the batter towards the edges. Do this slowly and carefully, dipping fingers into oil to replenish the oil. Then smooth out the edges.

Par bake the crust for 15 mins.

Remove the crust and either let cool on a rack for later or load it up with all the toppings you want.