I loathe tofu! When I was in college, you always knew when it was veggie night at the cafeteria because you could smell the baked tofu stinking like burned rubber way at the end of the line. :mad:
When my last girlfriend and I would go to a Chinese restaurant on Valentine’s Day, she always ordered steamed frogs’ legs and a plate of tofu swimming in hot red pepper oil. No wonder we eventually broke up!
Rant over. It’s just that the thought of any pseudo-dairy product on a perfectly good pizza makes me ill!
Have to agree about pseudo-cheese.
Seriously, skip the meat, go light on the cheese, and focus on veggies like 'shrooms and broccoli and green peppers. And get thin crust.
Repeat after me: Calories are not bad. Calories are essential, and in fact are the primary thing we need from food. Too many Calories are bad, but that’s true regardless of what you’re eating.
There are two components to a healthy diet: Get the right amount of Calories, and get enough of all the other things you need as well. Pizza is not inconsistent with either of those components.
One to do at home can be to use some Pita bread and make your own.
Just spread some tomato sauce over the Pita bread, add toppings in a quantity that overall doesn’t blow the calorie count and put it in the oven long enough to melt the cheese. Comes up surprisingly good if you like the crispy crust.
Rocky Rococo (in the Midwest) used to do a vegetarian pizza that really did rock! Olives (green and black), onions, mushrooms … I could live on that permanently, if I had to.
I haven’t been to the US in years. I hope Rocky’s is still around!
Objectively you can do a lot worse healthwise than pizza as an occasional snack. The real problem with pizza and why it’s a no-no for me is that it usually comes in the form of a “pie” containing multiple slices, and while one or two 300-400 calorie slices may not nuke your diet for the day 3-4 probably will and I do love pizza.
There are fewest calories in thin crust. If you ordered a thin crust, light sauce, small cheese pizza with tons of veggies, it’s far from the worst thing you could do to yourself.
If you make pizza at home from scratch (and you definitely should) your sauce will probably be healthy, the sauce from someplace like Domiono’s though is usually loaded with tons of sugar.
My wife makes pizza at home, from scratch (or as she calls it, “cooking”). Over the past year or so she’s been gradually decreasing the amount of dough and cheese and increasing the amount of vegetables; we’ve reached the point where it’s practically health food, with no accompanying loss of taste.
On a related note, years ago I remember a segment on some cable health and fitness show on how to make a healthy pizza. What they did was replace the crust with a whole wheat tortilla, the sauce with mild salsa, mozzarella with low-fat cheddar cheese, and add lettuce, tomatoes, and other vegetables as toppings. The final product probably tasted okay but it was not a pizza. It was a tostada. Different food. Different cuisine. Different country.
Here you are for a pizza dough recipe that doesn’t have anything funky in it, and nor does it require a lot of kneading or specialized equipment like stand mixers.
Just load up on veggies and spices. Use fresh basil and garlic. You can probably get more flavor if you use a mix of cheeses too, like mozarella and cheddar (not too much, of course).
Lots and lots of tomatos, peppers, onions, olives, mushrooms, spinach, etc. Go nuts. I would also guess that if you want meat, some grilled chicken might be better than sausage or pepperoni.
Also, even if you do want to eat the “unhealthy” pizza, there’s nothing wrong with “cheating” every now and then. Treating yourself every once in a blue moon isn’t going to hurt, as long as you stick to your new regimen and don’t make a habit of it. Moderation is the key.
