Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Dateline: November 16, 2020 Cauliflower Crust Pizza, Two Ways

I impulse purchased a box of cauliflower pizza crusts.  I also had some canned clams that were almost past their best by date.  Voila, clam pizza.  Ok, that takes care of one of the crusts, there are 2 in the box, and you can't just save one crust.....The second pizza was a pesto based, onion, mozzarella, and romano cheese pizza.  

To keep the crust from getting soggy, I drained the juice from the clam cans and saved it in the freezer.  I dumped the clams into a bowl, added a T of olive oil, sliced red onions, mashed garlic and some calabrian peppers.  I spread a thin layer of olive oil on the crust and topped with the mixture above, spreading it into all corners of the crust.  A little bit of sliced onion left and some pesto were sprinkled on top.  Into the oven it went.

The box said to bake at 425° for 7-9 minutes.  I did 7 minutes.  The outside edge of the crust was cracker crunchy, but the bottom of the crust in the middle was not as satisfyingly crispy.  While the cracker quality of the crust was a nice switch up from regular pizza crust, it was not a replacement.  The cauliflower crust passed the skeptics test.  Would I buy it again, probably not, but it wasn't horrible.  In a pinch I would use it.

The second pizza was pesto on top of the crust followed by sliced red onions, little mozzarella balls, called perlini, and some romano cheese.  A few remnant onion slices were put on top along with additional dribbles of pesto.

The second pizza came out better.  It was crustier, however, the taste of pizza #1 was better.  I think that was because of the calabrian peppers which added a nice zip to the clams.


The pizza on the left is the clam pie and the one on the right is the pesto mozzarella pie.  You can see that the pesto pie is darker in the crust than the clam pie.



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