My experience began with preparing a tofu-based ricotta from Isa Chandra Moskowitz's "Vegan With a Vengeance". Firm tofu, nutritional yeast, garlic, olive oil, fresh basil and lemon juice. After all the mixing and mashing, the ricotta itself certainly isn't something to rave about, but after baking this stuff tastes fantastic.
Some time last year my mom gave me a bread machine after hearing my frustrations with trying to find vegan bread. It's a great gadget to have, but it (like my baking skills) needed to be put to more use.
The ingredients for pizza dough are pretty simple: flour, water, yeast, olive oil, salt, sugar. With the bread machine you can just toss it all in there, set the machine to "Pizza Dough" and the machine will do all the kneading and rising for you. "Knead, monkey, knead" *cracks whip* The whole process takes close to an hour and by the end you should have a nice, sexy ball of dough.
After the dough is ready, it's party time. I floured my hands and board and got to work; beating the dough with my hands, rolling it out with my new rolling pin and finally letting gravity stretch it out by holding on an edge and working around the whole circumference of the dough. It certainly wasn't round, but whatever. I ended up cutting it into squares rather than slices and took Isa's advice by calling it "Rustic".
For toppings, I didn't want to make my own sauce so I used the jarred stuff. Then I added some sliced Greek olives (black and green) from the olive bar at Fry's, mushrooms, red onion, roma tomato, a little Daiya cheddar, Field Roast's Italian Sausage and the ricotta I prepared earlier.
I baked it for about 10 minutes at 425F. A little chewy in the middle, but I was pretty proud of the finished product. I will definitely be doing more pizza in the future.
