Day 16 of the 30-Day Challenge: Procrastination Station
Task: To make homemade pizzas, using zucchini as the main ingredient for the crust.
Reason for Task: I’ve struggled to find a homemade pizza crust recipe that highly impresses each one of my family members. So, I continue to keep an eye out for promising prospects when I see them. I happened to notice that Alice, at Hip Foodie Mom, posted a recipe to her site back in September for a “Zucchini Pizza Crust”. I was immediately intrigued but lacked the gusto to go ahead and try the recipe at the time. However, I put this recipe into my memory bank for safe keeping and recently brought it up again, during my 30-Day Challenge period. I thought it was high time to bring this creation to fruition.
Duration of Task: 1 day. I’m planning to have pizza ready to go for dinner-time.
Outcome: All in all, I think things turned out pretty well. I tripled Alice’s recipe and was able to get several pizzas: two 12″ pizza rounds, one 15″ x 10″ pan pizza, and one 8″ x 8″ pyrex dish pan pizza. (Well, I had to get a little creative. I only had two true-to-form pizza pans). I pretty much followed the recipe to a “T” with a little fudging on two of the ingredients. I like to use mild cheddar cheese on my pizzas so I used that instead of the mozzarella. And, my family also likes a particular store-bought marinara sauce with a little bit of sugar added to it to mellow out some of its seasonings, so we used that instead of plain tomato sauce. Furthermore, I think I might have thrown my “Jana” flavoring into the mix when I got to step 4, because I ended up going against the grain and adding some extra toppings and seasonings that weren’t mentioned in the original pizza recipe. As a matter of fact, Alice recommends keeping toppings to a minimum in order to prevent overloading the pizza.
Again, my goal was to really focus on using Alice’s crust recipe (which was quite delicious); but then, I went with the additions that my family loves seeing on their pizzas. That means I had to start things off with spreading a layer or two of marinara on the top of the pizza crusts. Then, I laid out the shredded mild cheddar cheese, diced tomatoes, diced red onion on one crust and diced yellow onion on the others, sliced mushrooms, sliced green pepper, sliced black olives, and a sprinkling of Italian seasoning and grated parmesan cheese on the very tops.
Quotes of the Day (from the fam.):
- Hubby – “Don’t go back… don’t go back…” (He’s for Team Zucchini Crust).
- Toodlez – “I’m good if you make it like this all the time.” (She’s for Team Zucchini Crust).
- Junior – “Flavorful.” (I think he’s still rooting for “Team Traditional Pizza Crust).
- Little Man – The verdict isn’t out on Little Man. His stomach was a little upset this evening and he opted to forgo trying the new crusted pizza. I don’t think he wanted to chance eating anything unfamiliar to his system, not until he feels 100% anyway.
- Me – “I do like my bread-like pizza dough, but this zucchini pizza crust is rubbing off on me.” (I think I want to be on both teams. Is that allowed)?
(The above responses were received after each person tried the zucchini pizza crust, with the exception of Little Man).
Something that I observed: Alice was correct in noting that you probably want to be careful about loading down the pizza with a lot of toppings. Since my household does like the additional toppings, I did find it helpful to bake the crust by itself a little longer than the recipe called for to give it more stability before adding the toppings and finishing out the baking. I think you just have to experiment a little to find out what works best for you.
I would highly recommend that you check out Hip Foodie Mom’s “Zucchini Pizza Crust” recipe for a healthy alternative to traditional pizza dough. Click on the link at the bottom.
Zucchini Pizza Crust! Low carb and so delicious! You won’t believe this is a Zucchini Pizza Crust! Read the entire recipe to see my secret ingredient! I have one more low carb pizza crust for ya! Very similar to the method of preparation of cauliflower pizza crust, here’s zucchini pizza crust! This recipe might be a…
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