Pizza has been a staple of the American diet for a very long time now.  At your typical pizza restaurant, there are all sorts of different varieties of toppings, crusts, and even toppings inside of crusts!  Vegetarian pizza has been available at these establishments for a long time in the form of a vegetable-heavy pie.  This is a convenient choice if you are running late for dinner or just out on the town and craving pizza.

If you’re at home, though, instead of reaching for the phone to order a pizza, why not make a vegetarian pizza yourself?  It’s easy to make your own vegetarian pizza, and you get complete control over what goes into it – or, more importantly, what doesn’t go into it.

Make your Own

To start your vegetarian pizza, you’ll need a pizza crust.  You can find these premade in the supermarket, or you can easily make them yourself.  Making pizza crust is kind of like making bread, but even easier.  You can find lots of recipes for pizza crust that don’t require rising, so you can be eating your home-cooked vegetarian pizza even quicker than you could if you called for delivery.

Next, you’ll need to decide on cheese.  If you are a vegan or strict vegetarian, you’ll want to avoid the dairy cheese and opt instead for one of the many other options.  Your vegetarian pizza can feature soy cheese, cheese made from rice milk, or a delicious cheesy sauce made with nutritional yeast and flour.  You can even opt to leave the cheese off entirely.  Many people fear that this ruins the vegetarian pizza, but the truth is that pizza can taste just as delicious without the cheese.  A cheese-free pizza lets the toppings and the seasonings shine.

The toppings will come next – this is the part that is prone to causing arguments among friends who are sharing the pizza tab.  Toppings on your vegetarian pizza can be pretty much anything you fancy: any type of vegetable, meat substitutes, and even fruit are all fair game.

Hit the Supermarket, Not the Phone Book

If you don’t want to do delivery because you can never be sure what they put in their pizzas, but you just don’t have the energy to make one from scratch, you can pick up a frozen vegetarian pizza in most supermarkets.  Again, you’ll have to choose between the traditional dairy cheese and the less traditional soy cheese or cheese-free pizza.  There are many options available in the health food section of many supermarkets if you love the taste of pizza but prefer to avoid the trans-fats and other unsavory ingredients in other frozen vegetarian pizza brands.

Tags: Pizza, Vegetarian Pizza, Vegetarian Recipes

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