Gluten free pizza crusts...

Last October I was tested for food allergies. This was a significant step in a ten year repetitive process of doctors saying "huh?" to my medical enigma. I gave up gluten, dairy, eggs and beans. This has been a tough few months but the more time that passes the better it gets. I sympathize with people who have food allergies. I now seek recipes that are GF and vegan. I am a meat eater but meat can be easily added later. Other things are more difficult to remove or replace. Dairy and gluten are in EVERYTHING! The growing number of people, including my sister, who have celiac disease can hardly eat anything without the risk of being exposed to gluten. So we must help each other and share our creativity so we can enjoy and expand on each others successes and failures.

The hardest, and I mean HARDEST, part of this new diet was giving up pizza. I LOVE pizza. I dream about pizza when I am awake and asleep. When I was little I wanted to have my own pizza place so I could eat and share the joy of eating only pizza. GF pizza crusts are a risky business. Some of them are terrible, cardboardy and impossible to cut even with a steak knife. Some are yummy but have a long prep time. They are all dense...or so I thought. I recently have been trying new types of crust.

First I tried Bob's Red Mill GF pizza dough mix. The result was a hard, dense disc. It was tough and impossible to cut. The flavor was lacking and got an "all-around-unappealing" rating.

Next was Stashu GF frozen pizza crust which are made by Mama Bossa. Stashu is a pizza joint in IL. ((Mama Bossa's makes frozen pizzas that are not GF and have dairy. "They are *expletive* awesome!"...or so I hear...)) Back to the Stashu's GF frozen pizza crusts, they come in a four pack and are fairly small (about 8-9".) They are the best that I have tried of the pre-made kind. They are still dense but thin, the outside gets cracker hard and they are easy to cut.

Due to my "AVOID" warning to all cow dairy I allow myself to have sheep and goat's milk cheese. I love cheese and had a short run in the cheese business a couple years ago. So this was A-OK with me. I do miss some things such as Delice de Bourgogne (seriously try this if you haven't, sooooo good.) A pepperoni pizza covered in Ossau-Irraty (a sheeps milk cheese from the Basque country) was amazing. The Stashu crusts served their purpose and did it well.

My sister recently reviewed two other pre-made pizza crusts.

Schar

Udi's

Both of these sound and look delicous and I will be trying them over the next couple months (if I can wait that long.) Her and her husband make their own GF pizza dough from scratch. I have eaten it with them a couple times and it is GOOD! I haven't attempted to make it myself yet but I intend to.

Drews GF pizza dough recipe

While on the GF subject, I recently read this post about the wonderful GF brownie mix made by Betty Crocker. I love them! They are just fantastic warm with some ice cream over the top. I haven't had a great dairy free ice cream yet but when I do I will let you know. My sister likes the cake mix and has some variations that are based on the yellow cake. I will be trying those too. Links below:

Red Velvet

Lemon Poppyseed

And just for good measure....banana bread muffins!