Spinach Feta Pizza

I love pizza. More accurately I love good pizza. I’m a pizza snob, I admit it. I come from “Pizza Belt North” (or Apizza as they call it there sometimes). After eating some of the best pizza anywhere in my formative years, I have no patience for frozen or chain store pizza imposters. I’ll have no papas, no huts, no pizzas that come with free cinnamon sticks—none of it.

When we started cooking gluten free, one of the things we missed was pizza. There are commercially available mixes and ready made crusts for the gluten free crowd, but honestly they are mediocre at best. I like a thin crispy crust pizza, just slightly chewy, not all doughy and soggy or altogether too thick.

After much trial and error, I have settled on the yeast pizza crust recipe that I based on the one in The Gluten-Free Gourmet Bakes Bread. I’ve tinkered with it a bit to suit our tastes. I substitute brown rice flour for white rice flour because I like the flavor and the nutritional value. I also do not use unflavored gelatin or egg replacer, I use soya powder, which adds the protein that the gelatin would have. I also skip the sugar. I do however mix up the dry ingredients in a large enough batch to make a couple of rounds of pizzas. You don’t have to, but it is convenient.

The crust starts out a lot different than wheat crust. It’s very wet, you can’t knead it by hand, it’s standing mixer all the way on this one, unless you have a team of very strong armed people standing by to help mixing. You cannot cook it on a pizza stone. It has to be cooked in a pan, and I highly recommend using a layer of parchment paper to ensure clean release. My pans that I use for the recipe below have a cooking surface of 10″ wide by 15″ long. You can use larger pans, if that is what you have, but the crust will not fill the pan. Even with minimal topping, you have to bake it before you top it until it turns golden to avoid soggy crust. The end result is delicious and indiscernible from regular wheat crust.

For toppings I experiment and improvise, but there are a few clear favorites:

1. Mushroom pizza with a very basic but well-laced -with -garlic marinara
2. Pesto broccoli pizza based on one served at Northampton institution Joe’s Cafe
3. Good quality Mozzarella, Parmesan and Gorgonzola cheeses with lot of slivered garlic
4. Spinach, feta, sundried tomato, and kalmata olive ( a combination sometimes referred to as “Florentine”).

Topping possibilities are endless. The main thing to remember is to keep any wet sauces to a minimum and make sure your other toppings are as dry as possible. I think pre cooking some vegetable toppings is preferable (mushrooms, spinach, broccoli) while others are best left raw (thin slices of red onion, peppers). Quality ingredients are always important for anything you cook and pizza is no exception. Cheapo processed cheese makes for crumby pizza. It’s also really best to shred/grate it yourself. Pre shredded cheese tends to loose flavor and dry out while it sits around in its package and sometimes has preservatives that detract from taste.

It is usually best to make your sauce and cook any veggies before you start the crust. Then you can slice raw veggies and shred your cheese while the crust rests and bakes. However, the first few times you make this, you might want to get all of the toppings ready first, and then make the crust until you get a good sense of the timing involved.

Spinach!

Spinach, feta, sundried tomato, and kalmata olive pizza

CRUST MIX

• 4 cups brown rice flour
• 2 cups tapioca flour
• 3 tbls xanthan gum
• 4 tbls soya powder (not soy flour, soy powder for baking)

Mix all dry ingredients together into a container with a tight light. Shake until well combined. This makes about six cups of pizza crust mix, enough for 4 medium sized pizzas.

CRUST

dry ingredients

• 3 cups of pizza crust mix (see above)
• 1/3 cup nonfat dry milk powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 packet dry yeast granules

wet ingredients

• 4 egg whites
• 3 tbs plus 1 tsp olive oil (plus extra for the pans)
• 1 tsp vinegar (I usually use cider vinegar, any will do)
• 1 1/2 cups, approximately of warm water (hot from the tap is fine
• cornmeal to dust pans (optional)

TOPPINGS

• 2 to 2 1/2 cups of cooked spinach (or frozen and thawed) squeezed as dry as possible in a clean kitchen towel, and chopped medium
• 1 cup of sun dried tomatoes, soaked in hot water for 30 minutes or so until reconstituted, drained and patted dry and chopped medium
• 10-12 kalamata olives, pitted and chopped medium
• 3 medium cloves of garlic, sliced thin (or to taste). I usually blanch the garlic for 30 seconds and drain and cool before slicing, this keeps a nice garlic flavor without total garlic overload
• 6 -8 oz of part skim mozzarella shredded
• 6-8 oz of feta cheese

1. Preheat your oven to 400. Adjust the racks to the two middle positions.
2. Blend dry ingredients together in a bowl and set aside.
3. In the bowl for your mixer, mix the wet ingredients and 1 cup of the water. Turn the mixer on low, and add the dry ingredients, about 1/3 cup at a time, mixing for a few seconds between additions. Add more water if you need it to have a firm dough that can be spread (you might not need all of the water). Once all of the dry ingredients have been added, beat on high for 3 minutes.
4. While the dough beats, prepare your pans. Line two cookie sheets or baking pans with parchment paper, brush with a little olive oil, and if you like dust with some cornmeal.
5. Grab a rubber spatula and use it to dump the dough out as evenly as possible between the two cookie sheets. Spread out into a thin layer over most of the pan, leaving a half inch or so from the edges.
   

   GF pizza crust ready for the oven

6. Let the crust rest for 10 minutes while you make sure you’ve turned the oven to 400 and work on preparing your toppings.
7. Place the untopped crusts in the oven and bake for 7 minutes. Rotate the pizzas from top rack to bottom rack and bottom to top and bake another 7 minutes until golden.
   

   Baked GF Crust

8. Top with spinach, tomatoes, olives and garlic. Crumble feta over the veggies and then sprinkle the mozzarella over the feta. Bake six minutes, rotate the trays again and bake another six minutes. Keep checking every couple of minutes after that until the top pizza starts to brown. You’ll probably need to move the bottom one up to the top rack and let it cook a little more til it browns.
   

   Pass the crushed red pepper

Baked Garbanzos

I really love garbanzo beans. Their rich and somewhat nutty flavor works well with many different types of flavors, particularly string flavors like feta cheese and garlic. I had plenty of dried garbanzos in my cupboard, time to cook them up and lots of odds and ends of other food that I wanted to use up. I decided to make baked garbanzos and incorporate the odds and ends into the recipe. I’ve written out what I improvised this particular time. This concept works well with other families of flavors as well as the Mediterranean slant in this version.  Canned beans also work.

Baked Garbanzos

2 cups of cooked/canned garbanzo beans, drained.

1 tablespoon of tomato paste

1 scant tablespoon of capers

3 tablespoons of crumbled feta cheese

2 garlic cloves minced to a paste or pressed

2 tablespoons of white wine

3/4 cup of tomato puree

2 roasted red peppers, minced

1/4 cup of parsley, minced

1 cup of mozzerella cheese, shredded (completely optional–I had it and wanted to use it, so I threw it in)

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Pour the drained garbanzos into a baking dish in a single layer. Toss with the tomato paste until coated.

Garbanzos covered with tomato paste

Stir in the rest of the ingredients except for the mozzarella. Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes. Cover with mozzarella if you’re using it and bake until melted another 5 minutes. Serve hot.

Ready for the oven

That’s it! It’s that easy.

Stuffed Eggplant

I love this dish. It’s more of a concept/ springboard than a recipe, since you can basically put whatever you want in it within a basic formula: mostly the insides of the eggplant, and grains , with smaller amounts of some or all of the following: other veggies (diced), herbs, nuts/seeds, cheese and beans. Even though it makes a really nice presentation, sometimes I skip actually stuffing the filling back into the eggplant skins, because there is always more than will fit and it cooks up just fine in a casserole dish.

The original idea came from the latest edition of the classic Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen. I generally follow the “Mediterranean Style” variation in the book as my basic recipe and adapt it depending on what looks good in the market/garden, what I feel like having and what I have on hand.

This does take a little while to pull together, but you can carry out most of the steps simultaneously.

Rice is cooking, onions and celery are sauteing, eggplants ready to be roasted

I prefer boiling brown rice on the stove top to steaming it. I think you get fine results in a lot less time.

Let it boil...

I’m serious. Some people already know this, but I still get funny looks from other people when I mention it.

Instead of the usual 1 cup rice to 2 cups liquid, you do about 5 cups of liquid to 1 cup rice it usually takes between 20-25 minutes to cook, although I like to start checking at 15 minutes. The obvious danger is that you could overcook it to mush if you don’t pay attention. You can certainly add more liquid if necessary during the cooking. Once it’s done, I drain it in a small strainer that fits over top of the pan. I put a couple of inches of water in the pan,put the heat on med and let the rice sit over the steam for no more than ten minutes. If I need it to stay warmer longer, I cover it and turn the heat off, so it doesn’t get mushy.

While the rice is cooking, I roast the eggplant (about 25 minutes on 375 F), saute onions, garlic and celery, and chop up whatever else I might be using in the filling. This time I used lots of fresh parsley, lemon juice, capers, pine nuts, a few artichoke hearts, roasted red peppers and feta cheese.

Greek Rice Pilaf

I take the eggplant out when the rice is done ( but I leave the oven on, as I’ll need it to finish the dish). Once I am done mixing up the rest of the filling, the eggplant is generally cool enough to handle. I use a spoon to scoop out the flesh. If I am going to stuff the mix back into the skins, I leave just enough behind to give the skins some structure. If I am going to cook it in a dish, I’ll scrape it all out.

Once assembled , it’s another 20-30 minutes in the oven and it’s ready.

The finished eggplants. I like to top them with smoked mozzerella.

Usually one eggplant half per person is enough ( using three whole, medium sized eggplants) when served with other side dishes.