Cauliflower Pizza Crust!!!

After being traumatized by cauliflower as children (thanks, Yvonne and Cynthia for trying to teach us to be healthy! :)), Jacob and I bought our first head of cauliflower as adults to try a new culinary quest this week-- Cauliflower Pizza Crust!

Jacob (and I) loves pizza. I try to avoid flour. This seemed like a good compromise to me! As I mentioned last night, Jacob made me promise that we would order regular pizza if this wasn't good! I had been excited all day, and finally late this afternoon I embarked on the Cauliflower Crust journey.

Our crust was found on pinterest and taken from Recipe Girl. I liked it because it had cheese in it, and I knew a cheesy crust was more likely to get Jacob to eat it! :)

Ingredients:

• 1/2 Large head cauliflower (which makes about 2 cups of shredded cauliflower)
• 1 large egg
• 1 cup mozzarella cheese
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon dried minced garlic
• 1/2 teaspoon onion salt (or onion powder + salt if you're me and realized in the process of all of this that you didn't actually have onion salt :))

1. Shred the cauliflower into small crumbles. We used a cheese grater. I grated half of it and my hand got tired to Jacob took over. On Recipe Girl, she says you can use a food processor, but we don't currently have one of those. This took about 15 minutes, but wasn't too bad! Again, you'll need about 2 cups of cauliflower crumbles. It took us about 1/2 of our head of cauliflower. Transfer the crumbles to a bowl and microwave for 8 minutes. Then let cool.

2.   Preheat the oven to 450. Spray a cookie sheet or pizza pan with nonstick spray-- this is very important or the middle of the crust will stick!
3.  In a medium bowl, combine the microwaved cauliflower crumbles with mozzarella, egg, oregano, garlic and onion salt. Mix well-- we just used a spoon and they mixed really easily.
4.  Pat the crust onto your pizza pan or cookie sheet. We made ours fairly thin. Spray the top lightly with cooking spray. Bake for 10-15 minutes. Ours only took 10 but I've had friends who had a hard time getting the middle cooked through!

5. After your crust is cooked, you can add any toppings like a regular pizza. We used pizza sauce, pepperoni and mozzarella! Then we baked the pizza (still at 450) for 4 more minutes (since the crust was just out of the oven it didn't take much longer).

We let the pizza cool, then cut it and ate it. The crust was soft, so we needed a knife and fork to eat it. It was pretty good! We gave it about 3 out of 5 stars! Jacob liked it so we did not have to order another dinner!

We also made a pro/con list about the crust:
PRO:

• It saved a lot of calories-- at about 84 calories for 1/6 of crust, it cuts your crust calories in half!
• It didn't taste like cauliflower-- we don't like that taste, so this was good for us
• The pizza cooked SUPER fast because the crust was already hot. Total cook time for us for the crust and our pizza was 14 minutes!

CON:

• It took a little while to make-- about an hour from grating cauliflower to eating. We spend a little more time cooking in the summer, but during the school year I'm only in for 30 minute or less meals!
• The texture was soft- I think I had envisioned a crunchy crust and I think that might have tasted better. We are looking for a crispy alternative.
• We don't think it would have reheated well-- it just seemed like it would have been a soggy, cheesy mess! We didn't have a lot left over but we just threw it away.

Overall, it was definitely a success! I will keep you all updated on our continued quest to improve the Cauliflower Crust! Hope you enjoy!