Raw vegan deep dish pizza
I'm not gonna lie: I'm pretty stoked about this pizza. I got inspired when Karsten and I went to Karyn's Raw Cafe in Chicago and afterwards picked up a slice of raw vegan deep dish pizza (for $12.99 - remember, that's for a slice!) from Karyn's Fresh Corner, the adjoining shop. The pizza was jaw-droppingly amazing, and impressed each of the family members who later tasted it. I knew I had to recreate the experience at home.
I found a crust that looked promising in a raw foods book I happened across in a thrift store (yes! can you believe I randomly found a raw recipe book in a Nashville thrift store?) and special-ordered soft wheat berries from Amazon to sprout. After a few days of soaking barley and sprouting wheat, I was ready to pour and dehydrate the crust. The dough as it went into the pan had a springy quality not unlike flour-based bread dough, so I was encouraged that this might just be the thing. Anyway, the crust dehydrated for something like 24 hours and then it's been hanging out in the fridge waiting for me to have time to make the rest of the ingredients.
Today, despite an injured back (too much gardening yesterday), I got into the kitchen and soaked, marinated, chopped, blended, and adjusted the veggies, the cheese (macadamia ricotta from Matthew Kenney's Everyday Raw), and the sauce (also from Everyday Raw), and the finished pizza is in the dehydrator now warming up for dinner.
The crust going into the dehydrator
marinated veggies
macadamia "cheese"
tomato sauce
Update: We just finished dinner. It was GREAT. I would add more veggies next time, and make a bigger amount of the crust so it can be thicker, and make more of the cheese, but when your notes for next time are "more, more, more," it's a sign you're already pretty close to the mark. This is going on my "stuff to serve guests" list for sure.
