behold, we have acheived PIZZA

but there was one area that continued to haunt me, a long-time lover stalking me, not ready to let go:  pizza.  i'm picky about my pizza, preferring a crust somewhere between thin and thick, and with no grease.  topping must be fresh and simple, light on the sauce (or even better, none at all), and excellent cheese. 

i did try a few of the GF pizza products out there, and found them absolutely miserable.  others i looked at were so ridiculously expensive ($10 for an itty bitty pizza crust?  that might be half a serving?), i didn't even bother.  i resigned myself to a life without pizza.

(or, quietly plotted to order one the friday night of a long weekend so i could gorge myself, and be sick for the next week.  sad, but it was really the point to where i was getting.)

until giftmas arrived.  bless my super-clever sister who managed to find my amazon wishlist and spotted Easy Gluten-Free Baking by Elizabeth Barbone that i put up there on a whim. 

see, i'm a cook.  i am in now way, shape or form a baker.  why make cookies from scratch when you can get the dough ready to go?  cakes are in mixes.  and hey, why else did we invent a breadmaker than to just dump in ingredients and be done with them.

but as i opened up this book and started flipping through, i suddenly felt inspired.  and then i saw it:  a recipe for GF pizza crust.  two of them in fact -- one thick, one thin.  and reading down the ingredients of rice flours, potato starch flour, corn starch, xanthum gum, i realized this was what i was already stock in my GF pantry. 

so a couple friday's ago, when i got to leave work early, i hit the grocery store for fresh veggies and some fresh mozzarella.  once home, i pulled out the world's oldest stand mixer (we are talking vintage 1989!  and it was used when i got it. . . ) and prepared to get the kitchen very dirty.  i should point out that i never did post my experience with making naan.  that recipe requires some modification because sadly, a dough never formed -- everything remained as a batter, forcing me to keep adding more rice flour so i could form little balls of almost-dough.  but that didn't mean they were going to then be palatable!

so i had me doubts as i measure and and began the mixer.  would this really work.  but after babysitting the mixture, and making sure everything got in there, i did have something dough-like to press out into my cookie sheet.  i happily set it in the oven to rise away, ala Alton Brown, and proceeded to chop up veggies, caramelize onions, and pull out various seasonings to create the pizza i had been craving for weeks.

the dough did indeed rise, and this was no "thin crust like a cracker" pizza that Elizabeth had described in the recipe.  oh, no, this was that in-between crust i love so much, full of the promise to be chewy.

so i set the crust in to bake first.  and oh, the smells that wafted through the kitchen! because of course i had to put in fresh rosemary and garlic into the dough as i made it.  my head was full of visions of the future, an thick pieces of focaccia served with soups, and dessert pizza piles high with fresh fruit and brown sugar.

once backed, i topped up that pizza so fast, and popped it back into the oven, eagerly watching for the cheese to melt and bubble so i could pull it out and eat.

that whole waiting to cool bit is a killer.  i did finally pull a corner of the crust off because i had to know if that most crucial bit, the crust, tasted as good as it smelled.

try better.  insanely better.  better than wheat flour crust.  this was rich and chewy, but with a finer 'grain' to it, as anything with rice flour is bound to feel on the tongue.  bu the flavor was spot on.  once finally cut into and first piece tasted, i nearly began to cry out of sheer happiness.   this is really what i had been missing, and was trying to very hard to ignore. 

amazingly enough, one piece was more than filling.  it is a magic crust, i say.  i was ready to eat half the pizza that night, but there was no way i could eat more than the one piece.  which is just fine. the rest was quickly sealed away and put into the freezer, a piece at a time coming out on weekend, heating up slowly in the toater over, and it passed the freeze/reheat test with flying colors.

so now, i'm actually looking into things like making my own chocolate chip cookies.  and maybe a cake.  that is, if i ever stop making pizza crust.