How to Make Simple Vegan Pizza from Scratch

Posted by tomatowellness on May 29, 2014 in Food and Nutrition, Health, Tomato Products

By Matt Frazier, The No Meat Athlete

For several years, my dad and I have been on a quest to make the perfect homemade brick oven pizza — without a brick oven. I tend to value simplicity a lot, so I’ve also tried to pare down the techniques and ingredients to the bare essentials. Homemade pizza is so easy and so good, it’s a shame more people don’t attempt it. I’m hoping this pizza recipe will appeal to those who have never dared to try it.

The basics of homemade vegan pizza

Here’s the overview of the most streamlined process I’ve found for delicious vegan pizza, homemade from scratch:

1. Make the dough in a food processor. It takes no more than five minutes to prepare, and needs only an hour to rise.
2. While it rises, make the sauce from a single can of whole peeled tomatoes, some olive oil, and some sea salt. No other ingredients necessary, and only about three minutes of active time are required.
3. Also while the dough rises, make the cheesy topping. What I’ve found works best is a pourable cheesy sauce made from raw cashews that goes on after the pizza is mostly baked.
4. Construct the pizza and bake it, ideally with a pizza stone if you want that perfectly crisp, just-slightly-charred crust.

Here are the details of each part.

 Before you start …

Two things need to happen.

1. First, the cheesy sauce requires soaking the raw cashews four to six hours in advance, and you’ll need a food processor to make it.
2. Second, you need to preheat your oven. If you have a pizza stone, position a rack near the bottom of your oven and place the stone on it, and position another rack several inches above it. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees about an hour before you’re going to bake if you’re using a stone (probably right when you start making your dough). If you’re not using a stone, you can preheat much closer to when you’re ready to bake.

Step 1: Food-processer pizza dough

I’ve found that a 3:2 wheat flour-to-white flour ratio works pretty well, and that’s what I suggest here. If you don’t have a food processor, you can use essentially the same process to knead this dough by hand or in a stand mixer, but neither is as fast as the food processor.

Ingredients:

• 1 ½ cup whole wheat flour
• 1 cup bread flour
• 2 ¼ teaspoons (one packet) instant yeast
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup lukewarm water
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 1 tablespoon olive oil

Instructions:

1. Stir the yeast into the water and let stand 5 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, put the flours, salt, and sugar in a food processor. Pulse once or twice to mix.
3. Turn on the processor and slowly add the yeast/water mixture and the oil. Within a few seconds, the dough should come together in a ball. If it’s sticky, add more flour, a tablespoon at a time. If it’s dry or not coming together, add more water, a tablespoon at a time. Your dough should be smooth and just slightly tacky, but not sticky.
4. One you have a smooth ball that isn’t sticky (total time the machine is running shouldn’t be more than a minute or so), turn the dough out onto a floured surface, roll it around for just a second then cut in two. Now for each piece of dough, grab both ends of the cut side and bring them together, pinching to seal so that the cut side is no longer exposed. Place each piece in its own, very lightly oiled, large bowl, cover with a damp kitchen towel, and let rise for an hour. (If you only want one pizza now, you can also let the other dough rise overnight in the refrigerator in a sealed gallon-size bag with the air squeezed out of it; it’ll develop more flavor this way.)
5. After the hour is up, punch one of your dough balls down, and use a rolling pin to roll it out on a lightly floured surface so that it’s round and about a quarter-inch thick. (You can toss it or stretch it out with your hands instead of using a rolling pin, but the rolling pin will give you more consistent results.)

Step 2: Incredibly simple sauce

I absolutely love this tomato sauce, and use it on any occasion I can. Pasta, risotto, lasagna, and of course, pizza. It takes only 20 minutes, almost none of which is active time.

Ingredients:

• ¼ cup olive oil
• 28-ounce can whole peeled tomatoes
• ½ teaspoon sea salt

Instructions:

1. Lightly pulse the entire contents of the tomato can in a blender or food processor to your desired consistency (I like to leave a few chunks). If you don’t have a blender or processor, you can do this with a potato masher.
2. Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium heat, then add the tomatoes. (If you want more flavors in your pizza sauce, like garlic, crushed red pepper, or herbs, cook them in the oil for a minute or so before you add the tomatoes.)
3. Lower the heat to medium-low, then let the sauce simmer uncovered, stirring occasionally, until it thickens, about 20 minutes.

Step 3: The “cheese”

I’ve found that by adding some water to a basic recipe for spreadable cashew cheese, you get a pourable cheese that serves so many purposes, from stirring into a risotto at the end to make it creamy, to adding to a burrito to take the place of sour cream.

Here, I use it to drizzle on the pizza near the end of the baking time, which avoids the mess caused by trying to spread thick cheese on top of tomato sauce.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups raw cashews, soaked for 4 to 6 hours in water
• 2 Tablespoons lemon juice
• small clove of garlic
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
• 1/2 c warm water, plus about another 1/4 cup for thinning

Instructions:

1. Combine all the ingredients in a food processor; process for several minutes until completely smooth. It probably won’t quite have a pourable consistency; if not, add more water a tablespoon at a time until you get a consistency that you can pour on pizza and will sit on top of the cheese.

Note: the only reason to use warm water here is that you want your cheesy sauce to be slightly warm so that it won’t cool down the pizza when you add it, so make this as close as possible to when you’ll need it.

Step 4: Assembling and baking your pie

1. You should have already position the racks and stone in your oven and preheated to 450, as explained above.
2. Place your rolled dough onto a lightly oiled pizza peel or baking sheet. Top with about a half cup of sauce (use more of less depending on your taste) and spread it around in an even layer. Sprinkle with Italian seasoning, garlic powder, or whatever other seasoning you like on pizza.
3. Place the baking sheet or pizza screen with the pizza on the top rack of the oven. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes, until the crust is golden brown and looks about a minute or two from being done. (The time it takes is going to vary depending on what surface you’re using, so eyeball it rather than worrying about precise timing.)
4. Remove the pizza from the oven, then drizzle some of the cheesy sauce on top. You can lightly spread it around with a knife or spoon if you want, or leave it dollops, margherita-style. (You’ll have extra cheesy sauce, which can be used for the other pizza or refrigerated for a few days.)
5. Return the pizza to the oven, either directly onto the rack or, better, on the stone if you have one. Allow it to bake for another two or three minutes, until the crust is crisp on the bottom and completely done on top.
6. If the cheesy sauce isn’t warm, you can put the pizza under the broiler for a few seconds to heat it up.

Enjoy your homemade vegan pizza! You won’t fool anyone into thinking it’s the real thing (the look of the cheese sauce is a dead giveaway), but it sure satisfies the craving and is delicious in its own right.

Matt Frazier is a vegan marathoner and ultrarunner who ran his first 100-miler in 2014. He’s the founder of the blog NoMeatAthlete.com, and author of the book No Meat Athlete: Run on Plants and Discover Your Fittest, Fastest, Happiest Self, where he shares an easy-to-adopt and low-key approach for active people to eat a healthy, plant-based diet.