vegan nolio pizza (lemon cream sauce with caramelized onions)

mix up a batch of your favorite pizza dough. (i like making pretzel dough as pizza dough. stick some olive oil in there for a more pizza-y dough.) (also, yes, it totally works gluten-free; use a combination of gf flours like rice, buckwheat, oat, teff, besan, and a starch like potato or corn.)

in a food processor or blender, whip up a raw sauce with a clove or two of fresh garlic, a few handfuls of cashews that have been soaking in water (or unsoaked if you like a chunkier consistency to your sauces), half a can of coconut milk (more if sauce is super-thick), a pinch of water, juice from half a fresh lemon, a generous amount of ground black pepper, and some smoky salt.

fry up a large onion, sliced thin, until translucent. add your favorite veggies. (we used broccoli and mushrooms, because that’s what we had, but i’ve really enjoyed just onions and raw fresh spinach in the past.)

top pizzas with sauce and veggies and bake at the highest setting on your oven (probably 500F) until crust browns on the bottom.

+

it’s wonderful. caramelized onions and cream sauce is one of my favorite combinations (can you tell i’m schwabisch?) and this pizza has been one of my favorites for years. served it to a room full of (mostly) non-vegans, and this pizza got eaten faster than the traditional tomato-sauce-and-cheese pizza. if you love this pizza, try zweibelkuchen, a rich, creamy, onion pie.

pretzel pizza

you heard right.
jeremy and i came up with this.
it’s one of my new favorite things.

recipe:
make a batch of soft pretzel dough. (1 t/package yeast dissolved in 1 1/2c water with 1 T sugar. add 3 3/4 to 4 cups all-purpose flour & knead 8ish minutes.)

smooth it into a pizza crust.

top with any sauce or toppings – jeremy made a tomato cream sauce with summer squash, roasted garlic, and fried onions. we topped it with swiss cheese.

egg wash the crust and sprinkle with coarse salt.

rye pizza with roasted red peppers, garlic, and indian-spiced mustard green tomato sauce

rye crust:

Dissolve the yeast (2 packages or 4 Tbs fresh yeast) in 1/2 cup of warm water and stir in the light brown sugar. Set this mixture aside and let it stand for at least 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, sift 2c rye flour and 2 cups white flour into a large mixing bowl with the salt. Make a depression in the center of the flour and add 3 tablespoons of the oil and 1 cup of warm water. Add the yeast mixture, mixing the dough with your hands. Place flour on the kneading surface and lift the dough onto it. Knead for 8 to 10 minutes.

Place the dough in a clean bowl that has been brushed with oil. Brush the top of the dough with oil. Put a clean cloth over the bowl and put it in a warm, draft-free place for 1 1/2 hours.

to top the dough, i tore a few big mustard green leaves into pieces and added them to tomato puree seasoned with cumin, coriander, fresh parsley, and pepper and simmered for five minutes. i topped both pizzas with this sauce, added roasted red peppers and garlic, and topped one pizza with fresh mushrooms and the other with swiss cheese.

i baked them at 500 until the crusts were browned.

 

i thought they were decent, but my housemates LOVED it.