Gluten Free Pizza Recipe – Vegan, Soy Free and Fabulous!

Across the United States, thousands of Americans are walking out of doctors’ offices with a diagnosis of gluten intolerance. I have now heard more than one local doctor refer to this as an ‘epidemic’. If you’ve recently discovered that you’re gluten intolerant, you’re in good company but being part of a crowd is cold comfort when you suddenly realize that lifelong favorite foods – like pizza – have become seemingly forbidden. Weep no more. Vegan Reader is about to share with you a totally satisfying, gluten free pizza recipe that we have created and tested (abundantly!) here on the farm. The gratification of soy free, vegan, gluten free pizza is just a few simple steps away.

Wheat Free and Soy Free?
My own diagnosis of gluten intolerance came bundled with an equally burdensome diagnosis of soy intolerance. As a devoted home cook who baked her own bread and could make literally hundreds of mouthwatering tofu-based dishes, I confess I shed a few tears. And then, I got back into my kitchen and started using my noodle (albeit a gluten free one) to begin devising new tasty dishes that could stand between my family and a feeling of deprivation.

One of the most frustrating things for me about these intolerances is that they seemed to put a barrier between me and from-scratch cooking. There is a growing inventory of gluten free mixes out there for baked goods, but all my adult life, I have avoided processed and packaged foods whenever possible. Worst of all, attempting to find gluten free processed foods that are organic has proved incredibly difficult where I live. There is not a single edible loaf of organic, gluten free, vegan bread to be found here. When it became obvious that I was no longer going to be able to bake wheat-like crusty loaves of bread without purchasing a lot of unfamiliar, processed ingredients, I had to think long and hard about something that could stand in for bread in our daily diet.

Enter Polenta
Polenta is a traditional corn meal mush, made for centuries in Italy. Purchase organic bulk polenta at natural food stores. I stress purchasing only organic polenta, as this is your only protection from genetically-modified corn (GMO). Cooked polenta can be eaten mushy or – and this is the great part – cooled and sliced into bread-like slices that can be broiled, baked, fried or grilled. Once you’ve got something that is acting as a piece of ‘toast’, you’ve got the base for individual pizzas! I count this as one of my great gluten free discoveries and I’m going to teach you how to create what just might be the best little pizzas you’ve ever eaten.

Making the Polenta
We don’t have a fancy kitchen, fancy tools, or fancy ingredients. We don’t even have any sharp knives around here. Don’t let gourmet cooking shows fool you into thinking making polenta is hard. If you’ve ever made oatmeal or Cream of Wheat, you can make polenta.

Step 1
Combine 1/2 cup rice milk with 2 cups water. Heat over medium heat on stovetop, adding a pinch of salt and a splash of olive oil.

Step 2
When the water is almost boiling, add 1 cup of polenta in a slow, steady stream, mixing with a whisk constantly. I find it is helpful to have the polenta in a measuring cup for easier pouring.

Step 3
Stir constantly for about 8 minutes. The polenta will be extremely thick at the end of this.

Step 4
Spoon the polenta into a small square dish. The one we use is a piece of glassware measuring 5″ x 5″. The idea is to end up with a loaf-like block that you can cut into slices. This amount of polenta will not fill up a regular size loaf pan. If you’re feeding a crowd, you could double the recipe and use a regular loaf pan as your polenta mold. Set aside and let cool for about 20 minutes.

Step 5
Unmold the polenta by running a knife around the perimeter inside the baking dish. Some polenta recipes advise greasing the baking dish, but we have never found this to be necessary. Let the polenta fall out of the mold onto a dish or cutting board.

Step 6
Slice the polenta into 1/2″ slices and lay them out on your oven’s broiling pan. Turn the broiler onto high. Place the broiling pan in the broiler and broil one side of the polenta until the top side is turning golden brown. We actually like our pizza crusts a tiny bit burnt around the edges. Then, with a spatula, flip the polenta crusts over and brown on the other side. Remove from broiler and set aside. Your crusts should look like this:

* After you’ve broiled the crusts, turn off the broiler and pre-heat your oven to 450 degrees.

The Toppings
When it comes to pizza toppings, it’s definitely to each his own! The suggestions I am going to offer you create a combination of flavors that my family is crazy for. We consider pizza to be best as a summer dish, as this allows us to use summer squash, tomatoes, onions and garlic from our farm. If you don’t have a garden right now, try to buy your pizza toppings from the nearest farmers market. It makes an immeasurable difference in the flavor of the finished dish.

If you have homemade tomato sauce, terrific. If you have to use canned or bottled sauce, try chopping up a fresh tomato and adding it to the sauce while you cook it on the stove top. We add fresh thyme, sage, rosemary, marjoram, salt, pepper and a little olive oil to our pizza sauce. Heat this up in a pot, pour it into a bowl and set it aside. Again, if you are purchasing sauce, make sure it is organic in order to avoid GMOs.

We’ll be topping our pizza with mushrooms, red onion, garlic, crookneck squash circles, sliced kalmata olives and paper-thin slices of fresh tomato. As with everything else, organic is the way to go.

Cooking the Special Toppings
I love this part of the preparation because it’s a one pan deal. In a skillet over medium high heat, briefly sautee some minced garlic and thinly sliced mushrooms in olive oil. Shake a little thyme over them. Cook just until the mushrooms are softened and releasing some of their savory liquid. It’s very important that toppings like these be pre-pan fried because, unlike with traditional pizza, the pizzas we’re making only spend a few minutes in the oven once they’ve been garnished with toppings.

Toss the mushrooms onto a plate, but leave behind the cooking liquid. Toss in thinly cut circles of yellow crookneck squash. If you don’t have any crooknecks, you could use zucchinis or patty pan squash. Toss in thinly sliced sweet red onion. Add salt and pepper. Stir fry until the squash circles are just getting tender. Toss them back out onto the plate.

The olives and tomatoes do not need to be pre-cooked.

The great thing about polenta pizza crusts is that they can hold plenty of sauce and toppings without getting soggy. If you’ve broiled them correctly, the outsides of the crusts will be crisp and toasty, and the insides will be soft and creamy. One of the things I love best about this gluten free, vegan pizza recipe is that cornmeal is already a familiar taste to pizza lovers. Many pizza parlors bake their crusts on a pan sprinkled with cornmeal, so the savor of these little pizzas is really going to satisfy your cravings for specific taste combinations.

Additionally, anyone who is vegan or has been put off dairy products because of an allergy will notice that the creaminess of the interior of the polenta pizza crusts has a certain cheese-y texture to it. I can even live without my once-cherished tofu in this pizza recipe because of the unique, creamy quality of polenta.

In topping the pizza, your first task is to smear a tiny bit of organic olive oil on the top side of each crust. This little detail will delight pizza lovers who have long been loyal to the traditional San Francisco Italian-style of pizza preparation which always involves lots of olive oil!

Second, smear plenty of delicious pizza sauce on each crust.

Finally, add your additional toppings. I like to put the squash/onion mix down first, then the mushroom/garlic mix, and then garnish with tomatoes and olives. Just look at how incredibly delicious these little pizzas look going into the oven:

As I mentioned earlier, the baking part of this recipe is brief. We’re just making sure that all of the toppings get heated and blend a bit. I know the pizzas are done when the tomato loses its shine because its juice has begun to evaporate in the heat of the oven. Remove from oven.

As a final touch to the pizzas, we like to sprinkle each one with a little nutritional yeast. It gives a final cheese-y note and adds to the nutritious qualities of the dish.

We’re serving up our scrumptious pizzas with a salad picked minutes ago from the farm – a combination of baby butter lettuces, olives, arugula and parsley with a dill and garlic vinaigrette!

Deprivation? I Don’t Think So!
I’ll be the first to admit that food allergies do put limits on what we think of as normal life. It was with a sense of desperation that I began working to create new recipes in my personal cookbook. Living on rice cakes just doesn’t cut it when you’ve eaten delicious wheat bread all your life. Additionally, vegan cooking without soy is somewhat uncharted territory. When I got my allergy diagnoses, all I could see at first looking into my pantry was absences. It was very upsetting.

But then, I took hold of myself and remembered that I come from an incredibly long line of skilled people who always found something good to prepare from the ingredients they had at hand. Some of my first efforts at gluten-free vegan cooking were total failures. It’s taken time to gain the confidence I need, and once enjoyed, in the kitchen, but I really feel like I’m getting there and I know you can, too. With creativity and deep appreciation for the bounty of healthful, delicious foods we can still eat even on an allergy-restricted diet, we can eat incredibly well.

I sincerely hope that this recipe for gluten free pizza will keep you from fainting with envy every time you have to walk past your local pizza parlor. I know the hollow longing of that experience. Happily, there is absolutely no reason to pine when you’re munching down on pizza this good!