[Photograph: Penny De Los Santos]
If I ever had to give up eating gluten, the first thing I would miss would be pizza. I'm sure I'm not alone in this worry. Good pizza can be made without meat or even dairy, but without gluten-y wheat flour? Of this I'm not so sure. There are honest attempts at good versions—and Shauna James Ahern's is certainly one of those. Her pizza recipe in Gluten-Free Girl Every Day is cooked on the grill, which is a smart idea for any type of pizza, glutenous or otherwise. The dough is made from a mixture of millet, sweet rice flour, potato starch, psyllium, oil, egg, and yeast. Once mixed and risen, it looks more like cookie batter than pizza dough, but it rolls out easily (much like corn tortillas, actually) and bakes into a half crackery, half bready crust. In other words, it totally works. If you're looking for a gluten-free pizza to try, start here.
Why I picked this recipe: Gluten-free pizza? Could it be good?
What worked: The dough was surprisingly successful. It didn't taste like wheat-based pizza dough, but it was still tasty in its own right. Later experiments using the dough to make a gluten-free naan worked even better.
What didn't: In the notes, Ahern suggests baking the dough as two 12-inch pizzas in the oven as an alternative to the grill. I found that this method gave me a thicker, breadier pizza than I wanted. It worked much better when I used less dough, rolled it more thinly, and gave it a five minute topping-less stint in the oven before adding sauce and cheese.
Suggested tweaks: You can use this dough in place of other enriched flatbread doughs in recipes for naan or pita breads.
As always with our Cook the Book feature, we have five (5) copies of Gluten-Free Girl Every Day to give away this week.
About the author: Kate Williams is a freelance writer and personal chef living in Berkeley, CA. She is a contributor to The Oxford American, Berkeleyside NOSH, and blogs at cookingwolves.wordpress.com.