Ingredients, Substitutions and Equipment

Pizza is actually a pretty simple food to cook. You’d never know that though, since most of us are accustomed to paying someone else to make our pizza, or at least our pizza crust, for us. When gluten free frozen pizzas first became available in our area, I tried them.  They were not good, to say the least. I’ve also tried Mellow Mushroom’s gluten free pizzas. They are alright, but not as good as the pizza that I can make at home.  So, in the interest of making sure that the gluten free world has good pizza to eat, let’s talk about what makes for a good gluten free pizza.

Ingredients: The basic ingredients in a pizza crust are flour, salt, sugar, water and yeast.  I use my GF flour mix for these pizza recipes. You can use either the regular GF mix or the soy-free GF mix. I’ve started adding the weight of the flour to the recipes, for those of you who choose to weigh your flours.

If you’re unable to use corn, then substitute tapioca starch for the corn starch and almond flour for the masa harina.  With this substitutions the flour becomes less absorbent, so you’ll need less water than the recipes calls for.Just be sure to add the water to the flour gradually until you get to the right consistency.

For those of you who avoid sugar, but do use other natural sweeteners, you can substitute an appropriate amount of another sweetener. If you can not use any sweeteners at all, then just add the yeast directly to the flour without proofing it. The yeast will activate and began to do its work without the sugar; it will just not do it as fast.

Yeast is not actually a required ingredient in pizza. The St. Louis Style thin crust pizza uses baking powder as the leavening agent. If you cannot use yeast, then try that recipes. It’s very good.

All of the crust recipes are naturally dairy free, or can be made dairy free.  If you also need to have a cheese-free pizza, then I suggest that you browse a few vegan blogs for pizza recipes.  There are a number of non-dairy cheese alternatives and I think that you’ll find that many vegan cooks have perfected the non-cheese pizza.

Equipment: You don’t have to have any special equipment to make gluten free pizza, though there are some items that are nice to have. The first of these is a pizza stone.  Pizza stones soak up the heat from your oven and apply it directly to the bottom of your pizza crust. This can go a long way towards getting a nice, crispy crust.  If you don’t have a pizza stone, then you can bake your pizza on top of a baking sheet that you have turned upside down too.  I have a baking stone, but still use a baking sheet frequently, since I like to bake two pizzas for our weekly pizza night.

A pizza peel is a nice tool for moving the pizza dough to the stone and taking it out after it’s baked.  You don’t have to have it, but it does mean that you can get the pizza in and out of the oven more quickly which allows more of the hot air to stay in the oven.  If you don’t have one (and I don’t) then watch the Regular Crust video to see how I move my dough from the counter to the hot baking stone.

If you’re making one of the rolled out pizza crusts, then you’ll also need a rolling pin.  As you’ll see in one of the videos, my rolling pin is getting quite old and we nearly broke it while we were making this video.  When, I replace it I’m going to get a good heavy wooden rolling pin that will hopefully be indestructible.

The last piece of equipment that you need is a hot oven.  And I mean hot!  Commercial pizza ovens bake pizza at upwards of 900 degrees F, so crank your oven as high as it will go. Even if the recipes doesn’t call for heat that high, feel free to experiment with a number of different temperatures.