Vegan Pizza: The Video

[[I originally made this video for the website SFVegan, but I plan to make an Ethical Pizza version of it as well.]

As promised earlier, we have completed producing the mother of all vegan pizza videos. The video is about 20 minutes, and you can also download it from its Vimeo page, which will yield the best picture quality (it's about 240 MB). 20 minutes may seem long, but when you think about it, it's actually not a lot of work for delicious vegan pizza at home!

In the video, I promise to have complete instructions and many tips on here, but I am currently too busy to write up a cookbook style description about the process. So I'm hoping that the video speaks for itself, because I don't want to delay the release any longer than absolutely necessary (though I may extend this post over time to add more information).

Here are a couple of observations and tips:

-- These instructions make two 14 inch pizzas, which should feed 4-6 people. Or in our case, it feeds two for dinner and lunch the next day, with some extra left over.

-- The dough I make is very "wet" (= its water / flour ratio is high). To me, using a wet dough is essential to achieve a good crust. It also needs no kneading, which makes it super easy and quick to prepare. Handling such wet doughs may require a little practice, but basically you can't go wrong, so don't panic. Just use ample flour to keep it from sticking.

-- I find that using a tiny amount of yeast and a long rising time yields a crust that has the best flavor, and it also fits the best into my day: I mix the dough in the morning, and when I come home in the evening, the pizza is ready to make, no more waiting is required. However, when I want to make pizza from scratch as fast as possible, I use 1 1/2 tsp. yeast, and let the dough rise at a warm place for only 90 minutes, which works just fine as well.

-- Obviously, you can top the pizzas however you like. The tomato sauce I'm showing in the video is very popular in our house. If I don't have fresh basil on hand, I substitute 1 or 2 tsp. dry basil. Recently Kathleen has made pizzas with pesto (using the pesto recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance) and they were fantastic. In fact, I may have a new favorite...

-- You can use any sort of vegan cheese or not use any altogether. Most of the time I use Vegan Gourmet Mozzarella, but I have made very good experiences with Teese as well (only, it's not readily available around here, and I don't like to order it online). I also find that adding a little Soy Bleu on top of the Vegan Gourmet makes for a great flavor combination, which is why I do it in the video.

-- Using the pizza crispers makes for nice and round pizzas, and easy baking. The parchment paper is not strictly required, as the crispers I use are nonstick. However, a few times, the dough HAS stuck, and I can't tell you how frustrating it is to have a beautiful pizza, and all the work that went into it, be destroyed because of that. This is why I now always use parchment paper just for insurance.

-- I used to bake on stone, but I don't anymore. As I say in the video, I personally think pizza stones are overrated. I find nothing works as well as these cheap crispers.

-- I am not 100% happy with the way the crust turned out in the videos. Usually I like my crusts to be more on the crispy side. I probably should have baked them for 5 or so more minutes, but apparently I was getting anxious to finish the video...

-- In the end, perhaps the most important factor in your baking is your oven. The spartan oven in our flea-sized rental kitchen is not exactly what you'd call a modern gourmet oven. For now, I can only dream of a nice convection oven and a bigger kitchen, but rest assured that if I can turn out pizzas this good in our shitty little oven, then if you have a better oven than us (and chances are you do), you should have zero problems to make some great pizza.

The "set".

-- In addition to the crispers, some additional noteworthy tools I use in the video are:

• Metal Dough Scraper: indispensable for more serious bakers for measuring flour, cleanup, and working with (cutting) dough.
  
  
• Plastic dough scraper: Very handy for getting doughs out of round bowls, and to clean the bowls.
  
  
• Kitchen towels: I like to do most "dough manipulations" on floured kitchen towels. This makes cleanup much easier.
  
  
• Pastry roller: As you see in the video, it's a great tool for rolling out the dough.
  

Well, this is it for now... I hope you enjoyed the video and this post. If you do decide to give my method a try, I would be happy to hear how it turned out, so don't be shy to drop us a note!