Cookbook Challenge #15: Amazing Gluten-Free Pizza from Your Very Own Kitchen

 If this sounds more like a fangirl love letter than a food(ish) blog, that’s because it is. After more than a decade of improvised, substituted, sub-standard gluten-free pizzas, I’m here to tell you that excellent gluten free pizza DOES exist and it can be made in your very own home.

“This is the best pizza I’ve had since I went gluten-free.” – David. (For reference, he went gluten-free when my 15 year old was in preschool.)

Regular pizza, not the Montanara. I ate it too quickly for photos.

We’ve tried everything – flatbread pizzas, pizzas made from GF bread dough, cauliflower crust, every single brand of frozen pizza (Sabatasso’s from Costco is not bad, Kroger brand is nasty as hell), etc etc etc. We love Renee’s Gluten Free Pizzeria in Troy, but we don’t love paying $50 for pizza for 4 people that can’t agree on toppings. Same with Como’s in Ferndale, which makes really good Detroit-style pizzas; they’re tasty, but they’re a sometimes treat because $$$$$. We want to eat pizza and binge-watch Netflix way more often.

Enter No Gluten, No Problem Pizza by Kelli and Peter Bronksi - my new favorite people - a cookbook I found while scrolling around on Hoopla (which means you can try it out for free, but I promise you’re going to want to buy it). I took a leap of faith and bought a baking steel and pizza peel before we tried a single recipe – clearly, my kitchen is underequipped and I need more stuff in it – but there are recipes that you can try without special equipment. That being said, I highly recommend the baking steel, which gets hot as hell and does miraculous things to a crust; David tried his usual bread-dough crust on it first and there was huge improvement. Still not as good as the recipes in this book, though.

Be warned: you’re going to need to buy a bunch of different flours for this. But if you’re already GF, this is your life – you’ve got all kinds of weird shit in your pantry. Even if you’re starting from scratch, you can go out and buy $30 worth of flours and you’ll break even after a couple of pizzas. We’ve done 4 dinners from this book and we’re even on the cost of the baking steel and pizza peel, too.  Also needed: a kitchen scale and some parchment paper. But again, you probably have these things already because GF baking.

The first recipe in the book is for a New York-style crust, your basic regular crust pizza that you can slice and fold in half to shove it in your mouth. There’s a quick version that comes together in the amount of time it takes to find your kitchen scale and throw things in a bowl, and a plan-ahead version that wants a 48-hour ferment. We’ve only tried the quick version so far, which is also the foundation for a number of other recipes in the book (calzones, etc.); we also tried the par-baked version to use later, which was just as good as freshly made. I’m excited to try the fermented version, because I seriously can’t imagine how this crust is going to get better.

We also tried the Chicago-style pizza, since we managed to unearth the pizza pan we bought back in The Wheat Flour Days. Anna filled it up with some improvised sauce, pepperoni, bell peppers, asiago cheese, and fresh ricotta; the first slice very nearly had to be eaten with a spoon and it was magnificent. As a side note, we’ve been adding fresh ricotta to everything lately and it’s fantastic. You should make some. The leftover slices reheated beautifully – and held together a little bit more, clearly we were a bit impatient when it came out of the oven. I’m not even a fan of Chicago-style pizzas and I loved it.

The third style we tried was montanara, which is basically pizza’s answer to elephant ears. Note: don’t forget the xantham gum! We discovered the hard way that it’s the difference between a dough that acts like cake frosting and a dough that acts like dough. Second note: If you accidentally make the cake-frosting version, cut out the circle of parchment paper it’s on and slide it into the hot oil. Works like a charm. The first one was a dinner version, with fresh ricotta, fresh basil, and sliced tomatoes; the second one was the garlic oil one in the book, served next to some potato leek soup. Both were excellent if you liked fried things (I do) but also very filling. We doubled the recipe next time and split the dough in quarters so everyone got their own and there was no fighting over the crispy end pieces.

And we’re just getting started! There are also recipes for Neapolitan pizzas, thin-crust, Detroit-style, California, grilled, buckwheat, and grain-free crusts. There’s instructions for calzones. There are recipes for breakfast pizzas and dessert pizzas. And we’re going to make them all!

To tide you over until your new pizza-making equipment arrives, here’s a recipe for the montanara, which you can make in a cast-iron pan.

Montanara Dough

80 grams warm water
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp active dry yeast
20 grams potato starch
20 grams tapioca starch
20 grams millet flour
20 grams quinoa flour
10 grams brown rice flour
½ tsp ground psyllium husk
½ tsp salt
½ tsp xantham gum
2 Tbsp olive oil

 In a small bowl, whisk together the water, sugar, and yeast. Set aside to allow the yeast to activate, about 5 minutes, until foamy.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the remaining ingredients except the olive oil.

When the yeast mixture is foamy on top, add the oil and stir to combine. Pour the yeast mixture into the flour mixture and stir vigorously with a spoon until it is smooth, there are no lumps, and it forms a loose dough.

What to do with it: Garlic Montanara

Frying oil
2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
Bench flour (extra flour for working with the dough); I recommend superfine rice flour
1 recipe Montanara dough  
2 Tbsp grated Parmesan or Romano cheese
1 Tbsp chopped parsley

Heat the frying oil to 375 in a 10-inch pan over medium-high heat.

Combine the olive oil and garlic in a small bowl and set aside.

Place a 15-inch square of parchment paper on a flat surface and dust with about 2 Tbsp of bench flour. Scrape the dough out of the bowl onto the parchment.

Coat your fingers with bench flour, sprinkle a little on the top of the dough, and carefully work the dough into a flat 9-inch circle, using a little more flour as needed to keep everything from sticking to your hands.

Gently flip the dough off the parchment onto your hand and slide it into the hot oil. If this is too stressful, cut out the paper in a circle around the dough and stick the whole thing in the oil; it will separate when you flip the dough.

Cook for a minute or so on the first side, until it’s golden brown, then very carefully flip the dough (use tongs, not a spatula) and cook for another minute or two on the other side.

Transfer the cooked dough to a paper towel to drain the excess oil, then transfer to a plate and drizzle with the garlic oil. Sprinkle with the cheese and parsley.