An Epic Pizza Failure

About author / Pamela Chester

Mom of two; graduate French Culinary Institute; kids cooking program instructor; Master's degree in food studies. Creates kid friendly foods and loves her slow cooker.

In an attempt to try something new this week, I made a cauliflower pizza crust recipe. It’s been posted all over the internet lately and had received a ringing endorsement on an internet pin board. It seems like the perfect fare for a Tuesday night dinner, a gluten free pizza crust made with a healthy base of ground cauliflower in place of the flour.

The reviews from a Facebook friend promised that the dough would turn out exactly like a regular pizza crust; your family wouldn’t be able to tell a difference. Ideal for pizza lovers who need to avoid wheat or want to include more vegetables in a family mainstay. The mouthwatering photo posted along with the recipe told the same story.

Normally I am not big on “hiding” vegetables in food just so my kids will eat them, but lately my younger son has been refusing almost every single vegetable, going so far as to ask them to be removed from his plate. So while I didn’t necessarily conceal that I was using cauliflower in the crust (there is a whole process of grinding it in a food processor and then cooking it in the microwave), I didn’t make a big deal out of it either.

I should have taken it as an omen that this healthy pizza dinner was going downhill fast when I opened a package of newly purchased chicken sausage that I planned to use as a topping, and it had already gone bad. I tossed it and just decided to do a plain tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese pizza. The crust was looking nice and brown in the oven and ready to add the toppings (in this recipe, first you cook the crust, then broil it with the toppings). And I have to admit it looked pretty good when I pulled it out of the oven.

When the kids saw that pizza, one of their favorites in all its forms, was for dinner, they started to enthusiastically dig in. But my five year old, who is usually game to try lots of new things and eats plenty of vegetables, stopped short. “WHAT is in this pizza mom?” Then the three year old wouldn’t touch anything but the cheese. And as for my husband, as Tony Soprano would say, fugedabouit!

In all of my years of cooking, this had to be my biggest flop ever. And by flop, I mean the crust – although the top looked firm, it never really crisped up underneath and was a mess getting out of the pan. Plus it tasted pretty disgusting. On to plan B!

I won’t give you the cauliflower crust recipe I used as an April Fool’s joke. It is easily searchable in many variations if you are really curious to try it, and you may have more success than I did; some recipes use much less cauliflower so they may be more successful. What I did find upon further research is that plenty of other people have tried all sorts of intriguing Pinterest recipes and met with disastrous and sometimes hilarious results. But there are plenty of gems out there too, and you’ll never know until you try.

So I learned my lesson. I’ll never stop trying intriguing new recipes and foods. But if I want to sneak vegetables, Jessica Seinfeld style, into my family’s diet, I’ll do it the best way I know how – in tomato sauce or smoothies. And while I’ll continue to play around with healthy pizza by making a whole wheat crust or changing up the toppings to include more veggies, I probably won’t be making that cauliflower crust again!

Serves/Makes: 6

• 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, finely minced
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 2 carrots, peeled and grated
• 1 red or yellow bell pepper, seeded and finely diced
• 1 can (28 ounce size) crushed plum tomatoes
• 14 ounces water
• salt and pepper to taste
• 2 tablespoons thinly sliced fresh basil leaves