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 Manicotti

One of our favorite recipes in my household is Baked Manicotti. Sheets of fresh pasta are rolled around a ricotta and mozzarella filling, nestled in a dish, slathered with a simple tomato sauce and baked until bubbly. Simple? Yes. However, I’ll borrow an expression from someone I know, this stuff is “so good that you could hurt yourself”.

After some discussion of the possibilities, we decided to make this for our Christmas dinner, knowing full well that there would be leftovers to enjoy the next day; Christmas all over again.

I had no experience with this dish until the January/February 2007 issue of Cook’s Illustrated. There I read a recipe for making baked manicotti that bypassed stuffing the traditional manicotti pasta tube. I was immediately intrigued by this recipe. The author describe a tedious, if not disastrous, process of stuffing pre-shaped pasta tubes, and the subsequent epiphany of rolling the filling inside pasta sheets. It sounded like something that would function like a lasagna, but might actually be a bit easier to pull together. The first time I tried it, we were hooked.

Now I did make one major variation from the recipe as published. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, my husband can’t eat wheat. Therefore the pasta recommended in the recipe was not an option. The recipe calls for using no-boil lasagna noodles, Ronzoni being CI’s favorite brand. The noodles are soaked briefly, drained and then filled and rolled to create the manicotti tubes. A little further investigation revealed that the no-boil noodles are thinner than the regular noodles. I thought, “oh well we can make our own pasta in sheets for this.”

Kneading the pasta dough

So you might be rolling your eyes and saying “oh yeah, that’s what you thought, I’m so sure.” Look, we had been making our own pasta for years prior to the discovery that we can’t use wheat flour in our kitchen. We were very happy to discover that we could just as easily make fresh pasta from flours other than wheat. Again, we owe a debt of gratitude to the late Bette Hagman for her recipe for bean flour pasta in her book The Gluten Free Gourmet. The bean flour recommended in the recipe is garfava flour, however straight garbanzo flour works well also (both are readily available at health food stores and some supermarkets.) This pasta has a wonderful flavor, and when cooked is as light as a feather. (If you have not ever tasted fresh pasta, wheat or gluten free, and by fresh I mean pasta that has not been dried for packaging, you really need to try it. It’s light and airy and just a whole different experience that the dried stuff.) I should think any traditional Italian fresh pasta recipe would work for this manicotti recipe, as would purchased ready made fresh pasta sheets

It’s not a work day recipe, as far as I’m concerned. Making pasta isn’t hard, but it is specific, and it does take some time, but not hours and hours. My husband Chris has turned out to be the pasta making master in the family, and it’s his hands in the pictures that you see making the pasta. Rolling the dough out for this recipe could be accomplished with a rolling pin, since no special shapes are required other than something at least vaguely rectangular. We do have a hand crank pasta machine, and it does make rolling out easier, faster and more consistent. (Ours is the Al Dente brand, which is not necessarily the highest rated, but it has served us well for about 5 years). There are electric ones out there, as well as attachments for the Kitchenaid standing mixer, but I don’t know anything about them.

Rolling out the pasta I

Rolling out the pasta II

Ready to be manicotti

Alright, so enough already about the pasta. The sauce is a super basic tomato sauce flavored with garlic, red pepper flakes and olive oil. Normally fresh basil and parsley are included, but it is December in New England, and the fresh parsley and basil that was in the market when I was shopping was dismally substandard, so I decided to skip them both. (I certainly could have tried going round to some other stores, but I just wanted to go home.) I do have dried basil from the plants that were in my garden this past summer, so it still has a good amount of flavor. The ricotta filling is similar to what you would find in a lasagna recipe, mixed with eggs, salt and pepper, Parmesan cheese, basil (and normally fresh parsley, but as I mentioned, it was a no go).

Like any simple recipe the quality of ingredients is imperative. Good ricotta is a wonderful thing. Bad ricotta is like chalky cottage cheese–your basic nightmare. Please remember, it is a major player in this particular recipe. Ricotta is traditionally made from the whey leftover from making Romano. There are recipes out there for making your own ricotta. If you’ve gotten in to making your own fresh cheeses, such as paneer, this is something to consider. If like most of us you’re buying your ricotta, don’t cheap out. If you can get hold of some local artesian stuff at your farmer’s market, or if your local Italian market makes their own, by all means go with that. Please please please if you are shopping for ricotta in the supermarket, buy Calabro. (Whole Foods may be the only national chain in the US that carries it; I’ll look into it more.) Pester your supermarket people to carry it if they don’t. I’m not just plugging these guys because I’m originally from CT, where they are based. I’m not going to name names, but all of the other major national brands have gums and stabilizers,which, despite lengthening their shelf life, just make them taste terrible. Period. I’m not even of Italian ethnic heritage and I understand this.

I have similar opinions about Parmesan cheese, but I am going to refrain from carrying on about them here.

Making the pasta is the most involved part. You can have the sauce bubbling while you mix up the filling. Then, once your pasta sheets are rolled out and cut to size, you’re ready to go.

Ready to be rolled

Nestled in, ready for the sauce and the oven

I’m pushing it a bit by crowding them in, but I did not want to start another pan.

Sauced

After 40 minutes or so in the oven, you have an incredible pasta experience. All you need to round out the meal is a simple salad.

It fell apart a bit while serving, but no one cared.

The photos are here.