A Gourmet Pizza

During a recent dinner at our favorite restaurant, I noticed a new small-plate dish on the ever changing menu: a grilled flatbread with onions, heirloom grapes, and a white garlicky sauce. Of course I had to try it. It was excellent, not that this was a surprise -- what's not excellent at Millenium? Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of the bread, but if you go, I recommend you try it.

Not to be outdone on the pizza flatbread front, I decided to make something similar at home. I wasn't striving to do an exact replica (for my part, I consider replication efforts to be beside the point), merely to be inspired by the Millennium flatbread. For once I didn't have fridge dough ready, so I made a half recipe of the straight dough (as shown in the video). When it was time to bake, I took a large yellow onion, and chopped it like this:



After sauteing on medium-high for about 15-20 minutes. Shortly before I took this pic, I also deglazed the pan with a splash or two of red wine vinegar.



After flattening the dough and docking it (to keep the crust nice and thin), I first topped it with about 1/4 cup of extra virgin olive oil, in which I had pressed three cloves of garlic (I prepared this before I started with the onion, to give it time to marinate).



I added a layer of fresh spinach, and some Vegan Gourmet Mozzarella, mixed with a little bit of Soy Bleu.



Finally, I added the caramelized onion.



The pizza baked for 18 minutes at 475 F.



It tasted very gourmet indeed! What an excellent pie this was.





The new pizza screens work well -- almost too well. Yikes! Look at that (very) crisp bottom. This will need some more practice. The bottom hadn't started to burn yet though, so it was all good.



Before I go, I would like to talk for a second about Vegan Gourmet Mozzarella, which is what I used here. Lately I have been all over the new star of vegan cheeses, Teese, on this blog. Also, reading around on the web, it seems that often there is a misconception that Teese is the only vegan cheese that melts and is worthy of a good vegan pizza. This is obviously not true, if you look at these pictures. Vegan Gourmet in fact is a very tasty vegan cheese that also melts. Teese melts faster, but VG nevertheless is a great product. And, it is still much easier to get around here than Teese (ie. it is available in more stores), though I do hope that Teese will become more widespread as well. Though I love Teese, I have no plans to stop using Vegan Gourmet anytime soon either.