#49. Reverse-Engineered Amy's No Cheese Pizza

If you're a vegan, vegetarian, and/or health enthusiast, you're probably familiar with Amy's-brand prepared meals. Most are frozen, though they've recently(?) come out with some (very bland) canned soups. They tend to be pricey ($2-3 for a snack, $4-6 for an entree, $7-9 for a pizza) but they are, for the most part, delicious, and the ingredients are generally more sound and consistent than those used for other frozen foods. 

I've been a vegetarian for over 8 years now, and I'd like to transition to dairy-free (as I'm mildly lactose intolerant and also have recently learned that dairy production is inextricably tied up with meat production), but it's hard. Pizza is probably one of the hardest things to give up (in fact, I ate Amy's Mushroom & Olive (and cheese) pizza just last night). So in the spirit of moving closer to veganism (and in the spirit of trying to save a little cash in the process) I tried to reverse engineer the Amy's No Cheese pizza using just the list of ingredients on the box:

Organic Unbleached Wheat Flour With Organic Wheat Germ and Organic Wheat Bran, Organic Onions, Filtered Water, Artichokes, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Organic Roasted Red Bell Peppers, Organic Shitake Mushrooms, Organic Agave Nectar, Balsamic Vinegar, Sea Salt, Organic Tomato Puree, Expeller Pressed High Oleic Safflower and/or Sunflower Oil, Organic Cane Sugar, Organic Garlic, Organic Lemon Juice, Yeast, Spices, Black Pepper.

I omitted: Wheat Bran, Agave Nectar, Safflower and Sunflower Oil, and Lemon Juice (I simply forgot the last one), and only a few of my ingredients were organic. I used roasted red pepper from a jar, and artichokes from a can (I'd definitely recommend getting a jar of marinated artichokes instead).

For the tomato sauce, I used leftover tomato basil pasta sauce, Bertolli, which was very good.

To make the dough, I used whole wheat flour and the recipe from the 75th anniversary edition of Joy of Cooking, and it came out so well that I bragged about it to both my mom and my sister. Here's the pizza after topping and before cooking: 

And almost done (see how lovely the crust was):

It took dinner, lunch, and dinner to eat the pizza, then I made baby pizzas on whole wheat bread to use up the ingredients (much quicker, and about 90% as good):

(On the baby pizzas, I remembered to top with fresh oregano just before taking them out of the oven, which I'd meant to do with the big pizza. It's a really good idea--I think of oregano itself as being "pizza-flavored").

Making this pizza from scratch was fun, and probably cost effective if you have a huge family or don't mind eating the same thing meal after meal. Do it, if you have more time than money, but if you have more money than time, I'd recommend buying the frozen pizza instead. 

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