Cauliflower crust pizza recipe - a Trim Healthy Mama approved recipe

This delightful cauliflower crust pizza not only tastes good, but it also is good for your body.

This recipe makes one medium to largish pizza. You might need to double the recipe, if your family is not half made up of pre-schoolers.

I've made this recipe a few times, using this Detoxinista recipe as my guide, but I've tweaked it a little based on my own experimentation and some tips I picked up from Trim Healthy Mama's Fooled Ya Pizza recipe.

My girls are very happy eating this pizza. It's not a dinner we fight over. Yay!

Cauliflower crust ingredients

• 1 cauliflower
• 1 egg
• 1/3c cheddar cheese, grated
• 1t dried oregano
• Pinch of salt

Method

1. Preheat oven to 190°C.

2. Grate or process cauliflower florets in a food processor to make cauliflower rice.

3. Steam cauliflower rice in a large covered saucepan with an inch of salted boiling water for 5 minutes.

4. Drain the cauliflower rice for several minutes through a fine-mesh sieve, pushing it down with a spatula to squeeze out as much water as possible. (Detoxinista next recommends squeezing the cauliflower rice through a tea towel to remove even more water, but I've burnt my hands and split two tea towels doing this so now I stick with the sieve method and it still works out well.)

5. In a bowl, whisk the egg and then stir through the 1/3c grated cheese, drained cauliflower rice, teaspoon of dried oregano and pinch of salt. Mix well.

6. Use a spatula to press the cauliflower crust mixture out onto a baking tray lined with baking paper. Form it into the crust shape you want, ensuring the edges are slightly thicker to avoid them crisping up too fast and burning in the oven.

7. Bake the crust at 190°C for around 35 minutes. (Grab hold of the baking paper and use it to flip the crust at 25 minutes to crisp up the underside as well. This will give you a firmer base that's easier to pick up, although you will still likely need to use a knife and fork to eat this pizza as it's not as solid as a flour-based crust pizza.)

8. Once the base has firmed up and crisped to a nice golden brown, take it out of the oven, top it with whatever pizza toppings you like and place it back in the 190°C oven to heat the toppings and melt the cheese.

We usually top our pizzas with pizza sauce*, grated cheese, cubed cream cheese, some form of meat such as pepperoni, ham or leftover shredded roast chicken, diced red capsicum and a bit of basil pesto for me.

I would usually heap on the pineapple too, as I LOVE pineapple, but that would turn this Trim Healthy Mama pizza into a crossover meal, with two competing energy sources - fats and high GI carbs - so now I forego the pineapple. When I get to a good, stable weight, I will add in the odd bit of pineapple again, but until then I'm happy to do without it.

*Tip: Since it's pumpkin season here in New Zealand, I've been making lots of pumpkin purée. It works well mixed with pizza sauce and spread out over the cauliflower crust before the other toppings go on. The colour matches, you can't actually taste the pumpkin but it spreads your pizza sauce further and you get all those extra pumpkin nutrients in your pizza. Win!