Traditional pizza crust requires gluten to have the right texture. There are plenty of GF pizza crust recipes that attempt to get it right, but without our least favorite protein, the bread-y chew is impossible.
You can try to approximate the effects, but if you are doomed to end up in the uncanny valley of texture, why bother?
No one eats pizza for the crust. The crust is but a carrier for the good stuff – sauce, cheese, toppings – all of which can be inherently gluten free. So one simply needs the crust to be structurally sound, not be distracting, and taste good.
Nature’s Hilights Brown Rice pizza crust is a nice choice – it’s *not* traditional pizza crust, but it holds up well with toppings, it’s yummy, and it’s got a nice nutty chewiness to it.
I get it at Whole Foods in the frozen pizza section, and it comes in boxes of two. They’re slightly larger than personal pizza size, so we always end up cooking both, and sometimes having the next day’s lunch. Sometimes.
I cook pizza on the outdoor grill, on an unglazed 18″18″ brick paver that cost me a couple bucks at Home Depot. Pizza stones are well worth using – they absorb and then evenly radiate heat, so you don’t burn the bottom of the pizza, and help even out the heat of the oven.
On the grill the stone gets easily over 700 degrees F, which is much like commercial pizza oven.
The thawed crusts are pre-baked, but I blind bake them on the stone for 5-10 minutes, then top then and return them to the stone for 8 minutes, rotating once. The bottom of the crust gets crispy without burning, and the top gets nice and golden brown.
Another reason for cooking outside is to avoid moisture. Even with thawed, there’s still quite a bit of moisture in the crust. A sealed oven can trap this moisture in the crust and make the rice a bit gummy. This will be worse in a gas oven because natural gas generates water vapor as it burns, in addition to the moisture from the food itself.
Then if there’s moisture in the crust when you seal off the top with sauce and cheese and whatnot, the crust can get a bit gummy. If this is a problem for you, try cooking on an outdoor grill.
I can’t find a website for Nature’s Highlight. The crusts are available at a number of sites. Amazon has a link, but they’re not currently available.
