another VeganMofo pizza post (with calzones!)

During last year's Vegan MoFo, I wrote a big pizza post, which included my standard pizza dough recipe, as well as a recipe for my zucchini pepperoni. Ever since then I've been amassing pictures of pizzas, waiting for this year's Vegan MoFo, because I'd like to make my big pizza post a yearly tradition.

I love pizza. I have standard favorite toppings (onion, fennel, olives), but I've also made curry pizzas and fig-jam pizzas. I'm pretty open-minded when it comes to pizzas. Being allergic to tomatoes means I almost always have white pizzas. I could make my nightshade-free marinara sauce to go on it, but pesto or oil and garlic/herbs are almost always enough for me!

You'll notice below that I experiment with cheeses. Cashew ricotta, crumbled tofu mixed with herbs and nutritional yeast if I'm lazy, daiya cheese when we make a whole foods run (they don't sell it at our co-op), and my new favorite: nut cheese made from the part of the nut you strain away when you make nut milk (I use bonzai aphrodite's recipe for nutmilk). I mix these blended nutty bits with miso, nutritional yeast, and Italian herbs and spices. Depending on the nut, the color can be kind of funny (note the brownish/purple cheese immediately below; cashews can be so weird!), but it's one of my favorite homemade "cheeses."

On with the pizzas!

Afore-mentioned nut cheese pizza topped with artichoke hearts, olives, and onions. A side of sauteed carrots. This is probably going to be the only pizza in this entry whose side dish wasn't a salad. I always associate pizza with a side salad.

Someone on the PPK forum recommended cooking pizza in a cast iron pan to make it a deep-dish pizza. Really bready crusts are my favorite, so this was a big hit! Topped with daiya, garlic, and onions. I think I baked seeds into the crust? I forget.

This is the quintessential vegetalion pizza. Fennel, onions, olives.

Sometimes I get lazy with my approximation of cheese. This is the crumbled tofu concoction I mentioned above. With fennel stems and onions.

As ridiculous as it sounds, I am only now realizing I never make pizza without onions. I knew it was one of my standards, but I didn't realize it was a constant...

Cashew ricotta (from Veganomicon) pizza topped with crumbled chick'n nuggets from Trader Joe's (bought back before they discontinued the vegan ones. Boo, Trader Joe's!). Surprise, there are onions, too!

You wouldn't know it from this post, since there's plenty of daiya here, but we eat almost entirely whole foods. So I'm sort of embarrassed about this pizza, where nothing is from scratch: store-bought crust, daiya cheese, and Yves veggie ham. (And onions, of course.) I think I made the pesto, at least. We had this on a really busy night, I swear!

I use my pizza dough recipe to make calzones, too. The amounts I give in that recipe is enough for 3 huge or 4 medium calzones. I opted for the huge ones.

After the first rising, I shape the calzones into rounds, fill them (here with daiya, basil from my container garden, olives, and--this is getting silly. Onions.), fold them up, and bake them!

I bake them at 425 or so for about 20 minutes. They're done when they're golden brown and they sound hollow when you knock them on the top.

The only thing missing was a good sauce to dip it in. I should have made that tomato-free marinara before I began them!