Week 5: Fallimento

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 pizzas that won’t work.

~ Thomas Edison (pre-lightbulb obsession)

I was excited to find Julie Hasson’s Vegan Pizza: 50 Cheesy, Crispy, Healthy Recipes. I had all the ingredients for the spelt dough on hand, but decided to start with the “Easy-Peasy Pizza Dough” recipe on page 2. It calls for standard ingredients– all-purpose flour, sea salt, instant yeast, warm water, agave or sugar, and olive oil. The basic ingredients of pizza dough and the building blocks of life.

I let the dough rise for 2.5 hours in a warm place, covered with plastic wrap. The dough increased in size and was a nice color. Unfortunately the dough was too sticky to shape. I added several small handfuls of flour, trying to get the mix to form into a circle and come off my fingers. After adding at least 1/2 of a cup of flour, I decided to split the dough into two.

Do you see that mess, how thick the dough is? Not what we were going for. We tried everything and the dough was just too sticky. I took one ball of dough and brushed it with olive oil and stretched it as far as I could without tearing it. That’s the dough on the left. The dough on the right was made sans additional oil. I added quite a bit more flour to get it to stop sticking to my hands and form into something resembling an oval.

Because I knew the dough was going to be thick and chewy, I added just a few toppings.

Toppings:
Tomato paste thinned with water with a sprinkling of salt, dried oregano, and dried basil
Vegan mozzarella cheese- a thin sprinkle right over the sauce
Black olives- from a can, super easy, you don’t even have to slice them
Sundried tomatoes
Garlic

Bake at 425° F for 15 minutes

The crazy thing is that even though the crust was doughy and not crust like at all, the overall taste was pretty good. Not sure if this dough recipe would work better if allowed to rise longer (the recipe recommended 2-6 hours, I went for 2.5). I’d be willing to try some other crust recipes from this cookbook and see if the spelt or heartier versions work for me. If you have a favorite vegan pizza recipe or crust to share, please do. Happy to have suggestions and try to recreate your faves. Until next time, thanks for joining us on this journey.