I love pizza. I grew up in New York City and occasionally my mother would send us to the corner pizzeria on 96th street and we would order a cheese pizza to take home for dinner. No extras. It was a delicious treat! Sometimes simple is best.
I have been experimenting to make a pizza crust that is slightly crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside and holds together well enough so you can pick up a slice and eat it with your hands. And of course it needs to taste great.
I use the same mix of ingredients asI do for my potato tortillas. The only difference for pizza dough is I do not roll it out; I press the dough in a tortilla press. It’s fast and it comes out the perfect thickness for a round pizza for one. If you are cooking for a larger crowd, allow each person to dress their own pizza just the way they like it! There is no better way to make everyone happy!
There is no grain, gluten or yeast used here just the magic of potatoes!
This makes 8, 16-18 cm round pizza crusts. Use what you need right away and freeze the rest for fast, easy meals. Your future self will thank you!
Potato Pizza Crust
2 cups steamed, peeled and blended potatoes
Flour mixture
1 1/2 cups organic cassava flour
3/4 cup garbanzo and fava flour (or 3/4 cup chickpea flour)
1/2 cup tapioca starch
1/2 tsp Himalayan sea salt
Method
Scrub 2 medium to large potatoes. Peel and steam them until they tender. Add the potatoes to a twister bar or small jar fitted for a high speed blender. The smaller jar will enable you to run the blender and be able to move the potatoes down the jar while it is going rather than continually stopping and scrapping down the potatoes. Mix until you have a smooth, sticky paste. This is hard on the blender so if necessary, run for as short as possible just until you reach the desired consistency and/or add a little bit of water.
Scrape the potatoes in to a mid sized bowl. In a separate bowl, mix the cassava, garbanzo/fava flours and tapioca starch. Combine well.
Add the salt and 1 cup of the flour mix to the potatoes and combine. Keep adding flour until you have a MOIST but not sticky dough. Add the flour slowly so you don’t end up with a dry dough. You want only as much flour as you need to bind the potatoes together and press with out it without sticking. I find I need about 1 1/2 cups of the flour mix. Every batch will be slightly different depending on the type of potatoes you use and how moist they are.
Once you have a smooth, elastic dough, cut in to 8 equally sized balls. I like to weigh them so I get them to be equal but you can eye ball it.
Put a damp paper towel of dishcloth over the dough balls so they do not dry out.
Press each ball in a tortilla press between two sheets of baking paper rotating 4 times to flatten as much as possible. Then carefully and slowly peel off the parchment paper and place the crust on a clean piece of parchment paper cut just larger than the crust. Repeat until you have pressed all eight balls of dough and each one is on a piece of parchment paper. To store for later, stack 2 to 3 pizza doughs (with parchment paper in between each one) and place flat in a zip lock bag. Place flat in the freezer.
If cooking right away, preheat the oven to 425c.
Place the pizza dough on a ceramic pizza pan (in the picture), pizza stone or baking sheet.
Cook the pizza dough for about 5 minutes. Take it out of the oven, put your desired toppings on it. I like to place slices of nut cheese, sliced onions, tomato sauce and sometimes thin red pepper slices.
Bake for about 20 minutes. Check 15 minutes in to make sure it is cooking well and not burning.
For an extra treat, I top mine with arugula lettuce, pitted olive slices and chilli flakes.
You can put pesto, any sauce you like or toppings you love. Pizza is all about YOU!