Vegan Pepperoni Pizza

Okay, here it is in today's lunch, the holy grail of vegan ex-pizza junkies like myself - Pepperoni Pizza. I have been wanting to try this for quite a while, but have never been able to find the ingredients that I needed here where I live. So this weekend, I made another trip over the mountain to Asheville, NC and visited their awesome health food store over there called Earth Fare. They have absolutely everything. There I was able to find all of the vegan ingredients that I had been reading wonderful reviews about and had been just dying to combine into a vegan pepperoni pizza. I mean, if you've read rave reviews about all of the individual ingredients and you put them all together into something else, it has to be good right? Well it is. It's not only good, it is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY GOOD.

First, I made my pizza crust using my favorite recipe. When I normally make this dough, I change the amount of water to 1 1/4 cups and the amount of sugar to 1 Tbsp. Leaving everything else the same, it comes out perfect. This time, however, in an attempt to make the healthiest pizza possible, I used whole wheat pastry flour in place of the white flour. I could be wrong, but I assume whole wheat pastry flour is the same thing as whole wheat flour only ground a lot finer? It has the same fiber content as my whole wheat flour so I am hoping I am correct. The dough ended up being a little bit too wet, so I had to add a couple more tablespoons of flour to get it just right. After the initial rise, I divided it up into 4 oz. portions which I thought would make individual pizza crusts which, when sliced in half, would fit nicely into the lunchbox. I was right. They fit perfectly. Now, with a healthier crust, all I needed were the toppings.

I used my favorite pizza sauce recipe, and then topped it with Follow Your Heart's Vegan Gourmet Mozzarella and Light Life's Smart Deli Pepperoni Slices. I had read great things about both these products, and all I can say is that everything I read is true. I could go on and on about how good this pizza is. I mean, just look at it (if you click on the picture it shows you a larger version). It tastes every bit as good as it looks and it TOTALLY satisfies any lingering pepperoni pizza cravings that may have been left over from my omni days.

I finished the lunchbox with a salad to which I added a few mandarin orange slices I had left over, as well as a few dried cranberries that I picked up over in Asheville. The salad dressing in the blue container is just my old standby of olive oil, flax seed oil and balsamic vinegar.

That didn't leave much room for dessert, so I squeezed in a Cherry Pie Larabar. Besides being delicious, these things work perfectly with the lunchbox when you don't have a lot of room to spare. I mean, it's really kind of hard to believe that you can squeeze 1 1/2 servings of raw fruit down to fit into that little space. Oh where would I be without my Larabars?

Well, that about does it for Monday. I'm really excited about finally finding the ingredients I needed and figuring out how to make a healthy vegan pizza that tastes just as good as the very unhealthy NOT VEGAN version. I do enjoy making other types of vegan pizzas now at home which do not even contain any cheese or any kind of cheese substitute, and I love those too, but those are just like whole new foods to me. Something that I didn't eat before becoming vegan but something that I discovered after the fact and really enjoy now. Pizza like this, however, is just a delicious vegan clone of something that I, unfortunately, enjoyed way too much before wising up to the fact that there was such a huge amount of torture, abuse and death which was going in to making food that was not even good for me.

In case you're interested, this entire pizza in today's lunch has about 7-8 grams of fat, and all of it comes from Canola oil and Olive oil. I did a quick check over at a major pizza chain's website and found that their personal size pizza (with just cheese and pepperoni) has 30 grams of fat, plus oodles of cholesterol and just plain bad karma. Low fat, whole wheat crust, cruelty-free. I think it's a winner. If you like pizza, I highly suggest you try it. I don't think you will be disappointed. I'll shut up now. See everybody on Tuesday!