Pizza Pizza, now with real cheese!

I love pizza.  Seriously.  Sometimes I totally have the eating taste of a four year but pizza may be one of my most favorite foods in the world.  Unfortunately that business is full of gluten.  No longer can I order a $10 pizza from Papa Johns or Pizza Hut.  Booooo.  Gotta plan ahead if I want pizza or even worse, pay that much for a frozen thing half the size.

So if I want some good pizza I need to do it myself.  I bought a Bob's Red Mill Pizza Crust mix at Berkeley Bowl in CA for only $3.69  (cheaper than I could get it in Hawaii).  Last Sunday night I figured I would bust out the pizza for dinner and then I would hopefully have leftovers for lunch the next few school days.

Here is the mix.  It was pretty simple.  Add the yeast packet to water, blend all the ingredients briefly and let it rise for 20 minutes.  When that's done you are supposed to dump the dough onto a well oiled pizza pan, wet your hands and spread it out.   The dough was definitely much wetter than your average pizza dough, there was definitely no tossing it around and shaping it like a traditional pizza.  It did spread out relatively easily, though I had to avoid not breaking little holes in it if I spread it too thin.  It was difficult though to get it into a perfect circle and I quickly gave up on that since I wanted to eat!

Per the directions I baked the crust for 9 minutes before spreading on my tomato sauce, mozarella cheese and turkey pepperoni (gluten free)!  I cooked it for another 15 minutes and it was done!  Voila!  Tasty, though slightly awkwardly shaped pizza.

So how was it?  The taste was pretty good, couldn't really tell much difference taste wise between it and the other homemade pizza crusts that I have made.  The major difference though was the texture and consistency.  It ended up being way thicker and chewier than other pizzas that I have made.  Kind of interesting as I had tried to spread it thin, but it was breaking apart when I did that.  I do prefer my pizza crust a little thinner and crispier but I am not sure how I could achieve this.  The dough is so runny I don't think I could cook it on a pizza stone or on the rack.    So overall, pretty good, I would definitely use this crust mix again but I will look around for others that might be a little thinner.

I did find this mix on sale on amazon.com 4 packs for $8.48.  You can buy it too here. The packaging looks a little different but the description seems pretty similar.  And can't beat the price, especially since gluten free stuff is so expensive here in Hawaii.   Bizarrely enough, there is a recipe for cinnamon rolls on the package.  May have to try and make a batch of those for Christmas morning.  

Oh yeah, and the leftovers for lunch the next few days.  Kind of gross.  The crust was a tasteless blob of bread with toppings on top.  Not so zesty.  Maybe if I reheated them they might have been better but I couldn't manage to make it to the microwave at lunchtime.  Now I know that next time I should just make a smaller pizza to eat that day and save the rest of the dough for the next time I want pizza.