Spelt Crust Pizza, First Attempt

Josie and I miss pizza. Not being able to eat wheat is a drag sometimes. In fact, it's such a drag that I sometimes eat wheat anyway, and if I'm already stressed it makes me quite ill. Dumb Lynn. So I'm working really hard now to avoid eating wheat at all. Josie is better at not eating it than I am, how weird is that? Kid has willpower.

Saturday we took a drive to Bob's Red Mill to do some stocking up. We were out of spelt berries to grind our own whole spelt flour, oat groats for porridge and some alternative flours like tapioca and sorghum. While we were there we found that they now make "light" or white spelt flour, the spelt equivalent of wheat all-purpose flour, and so we bought a sack to see how well it worked.

Last night I made pizza dough with it, using my favorite old dough recipe from The Greens Cookbook and just swapping spelt straight out. It didn't rise as much as wheat, but we knew it wouldn't--but it did rise. The top picture is how it looked when we topped it. The bottom picture is how it looked when it was done (the first time).

Yeah, the first time. While the crust was nicely browned at the edges, and the top was just this side of burnt, the sausage wasn't completely cooked and the crust in the center wasn't done. We put it in a lower temp oven for 15 minutes longer and it was done enough to eat. And it was pretty tasty, but I was disappointed I didn't get it right. It's been years since I made pizza because of the wheat thing.

Interestingly, we were watching the Portland/Seattle episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and he was eating at local hotspot Apizza Scholls (just a hop from TNH Central--Tony was in my neighborhood! *fangirl swoon*) and the folks there gave their rules for killer pizza--both of which we'd broken.

Rule One: Three Toppings, Max, and Only One Meat. We had only one meat (sausage) but we had at least six toppings--and they were heaped. Too much to cook through.

Rule Two: Don't Put On Too Much Sauce. We really over-sauced things.

So next time we're going to make two small pizzas instead of one big one so that we can cook it directly on the stone, and we're going to be moderate in our topping and saucing.