Tofu on pizza? WTF? Well, I tried it...and it was GREAT.
I mean seriously, just about anything will taste good slathered in homemade BBQ sauce in my mind...so why not use it as a protein on pizza? As I have mentioned, we've embraced a reduceatarian lifestyle where we eat primarily vegetarian and often vegan, but occasionally include humanely-sourced, sustainably-raised meat, both from land and sea. And if we are eating vegetarian, we'll often go full-vegan. But for this next food, we split the difference when it came to cheese...
And with that, after a smoker mishap with some spare ribs and a whole bunch of leftover homemade BBQ sauce, I started checking out Pinterest for ideas, which is where I discovered this BBQ Tofu Pizza recipe from Cozy Peach Kitchen inspiring me to use the tofu I'd already had pressing on the counter. I riffed on it, using fresh herbs from the garden and dicing the firm tofu rather than doing 1" cubes before baking it (essential for texture, you don't want soft tofu on it, that might make you gag) along with using my homemade sauce, and thin-sliced up some Miyoko's Organic Vegan Mozzarella (dude, it's so good...I couldn't believe it either, but compared to most of the vegan crap out there, it's all organic ingredients we've heard of instead of that highly processed chemical gunk that's making the rounds these days - you get what you pay for, in other words), then topped it with sauteed red onions from the garden and some good DOP Parmigiano-Reggiano (no, I won't go vegan on this...in pesto, you can sometimes sub things like nutritional yeast, but as a whole product, real quality Parm-Reg is non-negotiable for us). Just a note - if you are playing with tofu on pizza, you MUST marinate or dry rub it in herbs otherwise it tastes kinda like pencil erasers on something as beautiful as a BBQ pizza. It's why I recommend a dice or even a mince with the tofu because the protein, especially with all those spices (I used savory, thyme, basil and marjoram on ours).
Anyhow, it was gooood.
So good, in fact, the 'leftovers' only made it to, um, dessert...
"Pizza makes me think that anything is possible." ~ Henry Rollins
Comments