Cauliflower Pizza with Beet Greens

The cauliflower pizza is a new favorite of mine. I started making it as an attempt to eat more vegetables, but it stuck around because it’s just so delicious.

I encountered the concept of cauliflower pizza last winter in Australia, and when it was time to create my own, I used this pizza base recipe from Donna Hay. I said that this is a new favorite of mine, but that may be a bit of an understatement. I might be a tad obsessed with this, in fact. There’s something about how the flavors of the base meld, that is extremely mouthwatering and, for me, still a bit magical. By that I mean that I shave yet to understand how the ingredients I combine (cauliflower, eggs, almond meal) come out tasting a) so good, and b) nothing like what the parts taste like individually. I realize that this could have to do with the fact that almond meal never entered my pantry before encountering this recipe, and so I have yet to experience its contribution to flavor profiles of different kinds.

On this occasion of indulging my obsession, I was aiming to use up some beet greens that had arrived that day (attached to beets) in our CSA box. The greens would be part of my newly started project of using up all edible bits of produce (more on that here). 

First, I made the base by food processing cauliflower and then mixing the bits with egg, salt and almond meal.

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Then I spread the mixture onto a piece of parchment paper. The brown specks are bits of almond meal. Then it went into the oven.

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While the base was baking, I prepared the toppings: Red onion, torn beet greens, and grated parmesan.

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When the base had cooked for some 20 minutes, I spread it with some lemon juice and garlic olive oil, and then with the cheese and the onions.

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And into the oven it went again.

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After baking until the cheese started to turn golden and the onions were nearly cooked, I added the beet greens and put the whole thing back in the oven at high heat for a few minutes, just to wilt the greens.

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Incidentally, this also crisped up the crust a bit, which was absolutely delicious.

While I have had many successes with the varied toppings I have tried, I am still working on getting the base crispy all around. So more cauliflower pizza posts can be expected in the future, while I experiment with that.

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But all in all, I was very pleased with the result. Needless to say that with this pizza serving two hungry stomachs for dinner, there were no delectable leftovers for next-day lunch. More’s the pity.

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