Pizza!!!

Yes!  Today is the day I made my first Daiya cheese pizza.  The excitement and tension level in my kitchen this afternoon was off the charts.  The dough we purchased at Whole Foods on the weekend turned out to be gluten-free and when I unwrapped it from the packaging it just fell apart.  There was no way I was risking my pizza on that crappy dough so I pulled out my recipe books, found a simple one with lots of great instructions in Vegan with a Vengeance and got to work.  After a frustrating and lengthy search for yeast in which I re-organized my pantry, I was then faced with the dilemma of figuring out the equivalent of 1/4 ounce in teaspoons of yeast.  I have bulk yeast instead of those individual wee packets but with a quick google found this great conversion site called metric-conversions.org.   It's 1/2 tablespoon in case anyone wants to know! 

It's a good thing I started early because for a five ingredient recipe this takes a little time.  After mixing and then kneading for a good ten minutes, (my pre-pizza gorgefest workout) I left the dough under a damp towel to rest for an hour.   

The crust when baked was not as tender as I'd hoped.  It felt fine while I was kneading it but I think it may be my fault for not letting it rest long enough.   I was too hungry and excited to wait much longer than 15 minutes afer the second punch down and kneading.

We made three pizzas, one with just cheese for my daughter and two with veggies.   As an experiment, I laid the Daiya down first with the vegetables on top while the other had the Daiya on top of the veggies.  I think I had really high expectations for the cheese, never a good idea because as far as I'm concerned it did not live up to the hype.  It was good and melted well on one of the pizzas but the pizza that had the cheese on top was a little dry and not as gooey.   Flavour wise, again it was just okay, definitely not as salty as regular cheese.   Despite my reactions to the product and dough, I managed to scarf down an entire dinner plate sized pizza all by myself.  Now I need a nap. 

Melted Daiya pizza bite.

Daiya on top.

Daiya cheese underneath veggies stood up well.