I’m so excited. No really, I AM SO EXCITED!! This has discovery has changed my life! Ok, I concede I may be getting a little bit carried away but if you love pizza as much as I do but have to be gluten-free, or you’re just trying to reduce your carbs, give this a go.

Good quality pizza with fresh delicious toppings is hard to beat. For years I’ve experimented with different gluten free bases. Sometimes it would be a random mixture of different flours (corn, rice, potato, tapioca, polenta, buckwheat, besan, etc), sometimes with yeast, sometimes with egg, some times in an emergency it would just be a gluten-free wrap.

Lately I’ve seen the odd reference to ‘cauliflower pizza’ which piqued my interest. I hadn’t looked into it any further as for the last 6 months I had to also be dairy free, but now cheese is back on the menu. Bring it on.

After checking out the online forums and a couple of recipe sites I had the general idea – crumb cauli, steam it, mix it with egg, maybe a bit of cheese and bake. Alas it turned out I only had 270gm of cauliflower left. So I improvised…

Here it is, my 3 C’s pizza base, that stands for Cauliflower, Chickpea and Chia. It will rock your world.

3 C’s Pizza – Cauli, Chickpea & Chia

Makes 2 (approx 8”) pizzas – you could easily double it.

• 30gm parmesan cut into cubes. (omit for dairy free)
• 270gm Cauliflower florets
• 2 tsp Chia seeds
• 1 T Olive oil
• 90gm Chickpea Flour (besan flour), or dried chickpeas milled 3min Sp10
• 1 Egg
• Pinch of both oregano and thyme

1. Turn to Sp 8 , drop 30gm parmesan onto spinning blades Sp8, whizz until fine crumbs, set aside.
2. Add Cauli to the bowl, whizz 6 Seconds, Reverse, Sp5 (crumb it, don’t puree it).
3. Spread cauli crumbs on the base of the varoma, add 600ml hot water to jug, place varoma on top and steam 14min, 100 degrees, Sp2.
4. Run cauli under cold water to cool, squeeze out the water.
5. Empty water from bowl, return the cauli and add all the remaining ingredients. Mix together, 20 secs, Reverse Sp3. Stop as soon as it looks well combined.
6. Spread onto an oiled or lined pizza tray – this is actually the most difficult step as the mix is quite wet and sticky.
7. Bake 200 ~15-20 mins until lightly browned.
8. Add favourite pizza toppings, return to oven, bake until cheese is golden.

For the record, mine was topped with prosciutto, roast capsicum (pepper), fresh tomato, olives, onion, baby spinach and mozzarella. As a last minute inspiration I added a dollop of fresh basil & cashew pesto before serving.

{EDIT} Dairy Free

I just made this again only I left out the parmesan so that my dairy-free son could have some too. It still worked a treat. Obviously you wouldn’t put cheese on top either.