Things That Make You Go... Mmmm!

Time for a review post - and this one's for a vegan pizza crust!

You see, I have made pizza crusts in the past. Pre-kids. Now, with testing recipes, trying to get this new book together, as well as meals/snacks for the kids, cleanup after meals, playtime, laundry (oh the laundry), errands, yadda yadda yadda.

You get the picture. I love to cook and bake, but I am not interested in making pizza crusts from scratch at this stage in my life. I'll take a pass on that, thank you.

Well, Rustic Crust to the rescue! They have a line of ready-made pizza crusts, and some of them are vegan.

For this pizza pictured, I used the Tuscan Six Grain Crust, which although it uses white flour (and I prefer whole-wheat), it does include rye, barley, oats, flax, and millet. Rustic Crust does have a whole-wheat crust, called "Ultimate Whole-Grain", which I'd really love to try.

My pizza here was topped with a small amount of organic pasta sauce, a scant sprinkling of fresh rosemary, fresh sliced tomatoes, kalamata olives, very thinly sliced onions, and then topped off with fresh black pepper, and a new smoky avocado sauce (for the book), and a chiffonade (fancy talk for rolling the leaves and then slicing in thin strips) of fresh basil. The avocado sauce was wonderful, and I added some before and after baking to test. I liked the warmth of the sauce baked with the other ingredients, but the sauce really tasted d-lish both ways!

I used my pizza stone to bake the pizza, and the crust turned out very crispy on the bottom and still tender inside. The crust wasn't too thick, which I personally like, and it was pretty big too, which allowed me to sufficiently fill the belly of one pizza-lovin' husband (and kidlets too)!

I also used a crust to make breadsticks to pair with soup one evening, and our older daughter kept saying "mom, these are deeeelicious, you should put these in your recipe book"! Cute, but wish she had shown the same enthusiasm for the vegetable-chocked soup she was eating (um, not eating) that night!

Prepared vegan pizza crusts are hard to come by, especially ones without hydrogenated oils or a ton of preservatives - as they say on their packaging, their crusts "are made with a short list of ingredients that are as easy to pronounce as they are to prepare"! Yes! No more chemicals in our foods, thank you very much!

If you want to take a break from making pizza crusts from scratch, give these crusts a try. Oh, but one note - they are only available in the U.S. (currently)... and if any of you try that Ultimate Whole-Grain crust, please let me know what you think!