Sautéed mushrooms, onions, and peppers are piled on top of a cashew cheese covered cornmeal crust and smothered in garlicky tomato sauce to create this vegan deep dish pizza.
Reading: vegetarian deep dish pizza
I have a handful of ambitious recipes that have been on my to-make list forever. Stuff like this: vegan deep dish pizza. The thing is, as much as I love the idea of something like this, I can mentally psych myself out. It’ll be a massive project. I’ll trash the kitchen. It’ll probably take me eight tries to get it right. That kind of thing.
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Okay, so I did trash the kitchen, but I trash the kitchen when I make toast, so don’t read so much into that. And yes, this was a project, but you know what? It was fun and totally worth it. In fact, I didn’t even whine about it when the first set of photos sucked and I had to make the whole thing again! Because this baby was tasty business. Totally worthy of a couple of afternoons worth of kitchen trashing!
There were two major psych-out factors to this one. Firstly, the dough. I rarely make yeast breads because I’m too lazy to knead the dough and also too lazy to bust out and clean up the stand mixer. Usually though, when I do decide to suck it up and get to kneading, it’s not nearly as bad as I expect. This particular dough was exceptional – super moist and crumbly thanks to some olive oil and cornmeal. I can handle seven minutes of kneading for that.
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Then there’s the cheese. I’m all about making vegan familycuisine.net it’s easy. Like vegan cream cheese. Or nacho cheese. Throw stuff in the blender kinds of cheese. I know I’d have to do a little something extra for pizza cheese, wasn’t sure I was up for the effort, and didn’t know if I’d like the result. Here’s the thing though: in a Chicago-style deep dish pizza, the cheese goes under the toppings. When you’ve got your vegan cheese squished between or under other stuff, it’s a lot harder to tell what’s going on.
The cheese actually turned out pretty decent in it’s own right, but under a bunch of sauce and veggies, I’d probably not have guessed it was vegan. Feel free, of course, to go super lazy and use some vegan mozzarella shreds – you’ll be missing out on half the fun, but that’s on you!
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