Pizza. I bloody love it. Unfortunately it makes you fat. It just does. White flour, tons of greasy cheese and fatty pepperoni is an absolute disaster zone if you’re trying to trim your waistline. This week, I have been on a mission to create a pizza that maintains the delicious taste experience I get from my favourite pizza but also gives a bit of consideration to the calorific value of the meal. I got my friend and fellow pizza-fiend Mark Bristol round to combine our experience and passion to attempt to make a pizza that tastes amazing that isn’t a criminal calorie blow out.

My Favourite Pizza

As I said, I love pizza. Take away, restaurant and frozen, all can be great but all make you fat pretty much without exception. No one I can think of even markets a remotely healthy version of pizza [update - weight watchers do one, will have to try]. Anyway, I’ve had a lot of pizza. Take away is best, Dominos and Pizza Hut keep me coming back for more (or at least they used to before FlavourSmash - but God… do I miss it!). I’ve decided to settle on a Pizza Hut pizza as my favourite, the order goes like this: A large Italian Supreme with Jalapeños instead of Green Peppers. This yields a cheese and tomato pizza with the following extra toppings:

• Mushrooms
• Red onion
• Pepperoni
• Spicy Beef
• Jalapeños

You have to try this topping, it is absolutely gorgeous. Siobhan and myself absolutely love it. The combination of flavour is just right and we can’t get enough of this stuff. The overall taste of this pizza is quite sweet, they use a sweet tomato sauce and the onions have a sweetness, there’s also a sweet tanginess to the pickled Jalpenos, which also gives a substantial spice kick that is added to by the beef and pepperoni. The challenge was to make this pizza in the kitchen with a quarter of the calories… here’s how we did it:

How to make Pizza Healthy

Right, if we’re gonna make this healthy we have to tackle to the two main unhealthy areas. The dough and the cheese, there is a lot of fat in the beef and pepperoni too, so we’ll also have to look at that.

The dough

Pizza dough is made using strong white bread flour, yeast, sugar, a pinch of salt and a bit of oil. My idea was to make dough that uses a healthier flour blend. I went for the following…

• 50% Wholemeal bread flour
• 25% Rye flour
• 25% Soy flour

This gives you a wholemeal dough that is made a bit less ‘brown’ by having the healthy Rye and Soy in the blend, but without the extra calories you’d get by adding some white flour. Soy is high in protein and low in carbs but you can’t use more of this because it doesn’t have any gluten which is needed to create the texture of airy pizza dough. We found this blend worked a treat. We also added about 50% extra yeast than you would with normal dough, the brown flours were quite heavy and we want to make sure we were getting as much air into it as possible so upped the yeast. For the sugar I used a tablespoon of Agave Syrup, a wonderful all natural sugar extract that has the lowest glycemic index of any natural sweetener.

 

Mark was very happy with the dough

Wholemeal Wheat and Rye Flour has tons more fibre than white flour, this aids digestion and makes you feel full quicker, which is good. Overall this flour blend has 30% less carbs in it than normal white flour and with the extra fibre we’re really making a big difference by using this for our base.

The cheese

Again for the cheese we went for a blend, the idea being to bring together the desired properties of several different cheeses to create the perfect balance of taste and healthiness. After having a good think in the supermarket I plumped for 4 types of cheese to work with. Seriously Strong Cheddar (full fat, 35%), Tesco reduced fat Cheddar (5% fat!) and Pizza Mozzarella (15%), I also considered working with a bit of ultra-low-fat cream cheese, but this wouldn’t have been right. The theory was as follows, you want a good strong cheesy taste, you want low fat. The strong cheddar was for a good real cheese flavour, but since it was so strong you don’t need much which is just as well because it contains so much fat. The mozzarella adds a classic stringy pizza texture and the low-fat cheddar nicely dilutes the fatty cheeses making the whole thing healthier.

I used the following blend:

• 40% Pizza Mozzarella
• 40% Low Fat Cheddar
• 20% Seriously Strong Cheddar

Just grate it all down and mix it together in the above proportions. This blend has an average fat content of 15%, but it has a really good strong flavour and a perfect stringy texture when melted. The key is to remember that you don’t need to use much, real Italian pizza isn’t smothered in cheese like they do at PizzaHut, so just a restrained sprinkle will be entirely adequate.

The tomato sauce

I got Mark to prepare the tomato sauce before we got together to work on the rest of the pizza. We want loads of flavour here and not a drop of fat. Mark slowly cooked down 3 packs of vine ripened cherry tomatoes in the oven for 10 hours! Along with the tomatoes into the casserole dish went 5 cloves of garlic, black pepper and a few sprigs of fresh basil. We then whizzed all this together, added a dash of Agave Syrup to create wonderfully weighty sauce, with a subtle and smooth flavour. Remember the sweetness is an important part of reproducing what PizzaHut do, and the Agave Syrup is healthiest way of achieving it.

The quick version

If you’ve not got 10 hours, then here’s a quick way of making a sauce that tastes almost as good.

• 75g Tomato Puree
• A good drizzle Agave Syrup
• 1tspn Schwartz Minced Garlic
• 1tspn Dried Basil
• Good crack of black pepper
• 25ml water

Just warm all this together in a pan for 10-15 minutes and you’re done.

The rest of the toppings

The rest is pretty easy, mushrooms and onions are good for you anyway, so just get good fresh ingredients and cut them in to nicely sized chunks. I use small field mushrooms, they’ve got a much better taste than button mushrooms. For the Jalapeños I use Discovery or Old El Paso, you get them from the Mexican section of the supermarket (next to the taco and fajitas kits).

The Spicy Beef

This required a bit of extra work, but essentially it was really easy to create a low-fat version. I got hold of some extra lean mince, only 5% fat as opposed to the 25% in normal mince. We stuck the whole packet into a dry frying pan on medium heat and quickly knocked together a spice blend to liven it up.

Into my pestle and mortar went 1tblspn black pepper corns, 1tblspn smoked paprika, 1/2tblspn dried oregano and a generous pinch of cayenne pepper. Grind it all down and put it in the pan with the meat.

Just keep cooking it in the pan until all you are left with a pan of dry spicy beef, this should only take about 15-20mins. We then transferred this to a casserole dish and left it in the oven on a medium heat for it dry up a bit more. I have since discovered that this is unnessesary, so put the mix to one side ready to load on your pizza.

Bringing it all together

Pizza needs a hot oven. When they make pizza in your take away or at a restaurant they have special pizza ovens, these are hotter than your domestic oven will ever go, so we can’t compete here. Just turn it up full whack and it’ll be fine.

Once your dough has proved. Knock the air out of it and roll it out into the desired size. Try and make it as thin as you can, the less dough you eat with your pizza the better really, so try and get it nice and thin. Once your base is rolled out transfer it onto a baking tray to begin loading it with flavoursome toppings.

Tomato sauce first, 2-3 tablespoons of sauce should adequately cover a 10 inch pizza. Use the base of a spoon to evenly spread the sauce up to the edges leaving about a cm of crust.

Now lets add the toppings, evenly spread a handful of mushroom and onion, sprinkle over the spicy beef and regularly place the Jalapeños over the top.

Now add the cheese, don’t go over board, it can be tempting to smother it but there really is no need. A modest sprinkle will do fine. Bang it in the top of your red-hot oven. Leave the door shut throughout cooking to keep it as hot as possible. It should only take 7-9mins, keep an eye on it through the window. Cheese should be melted all over and just starting to brown and so will the crust.

Here it is, the FlavourSmash pizza.

Whip it out the oven and let it stand for at least 5 mins. There’s nothing worse than burning your mouth on a red hot pizza because you can’t wait to scoff it. You’ll enjoy it more if you can just wait those few mins.

The verdict

As we sunk our teeth into our creation, Ryan (of chicken fame), Mark and myself all shared a glint in our eyes as we all realised that this pizza was something of a marvel. The flavour combination of the topping had been recreated to almost atomic precision. The base texture was notably more wholesome yet retained the light airy softness that we all loved. The sweetness of the tomato was perfectly sitting alongside the sharp kick of the Jalapeno and beef. The cheese perfectly packed more than enough flavour and it’s melted texture was everything we could’ve hoped for.

We devoured two 10in pizzas between the 3 of us, enjoying every mouthful almost as much as if we’d been eating it’s fat cousin from Pizza Hut. Then we made this realisation, the main residing feeling in each of us after consuming the pizza was one of total guilt free satisfaction. We actually felt good about ourselves after this bout of indulgence, there was no grease stained pizza box in sight and we could tell our bodies were actually being nourished in a balanced and wholesome way, and that felt simply incredible.

Trackback Post

Related Posts