This weekend just past I whipped up a chickpea flour flatbread as seen on James Wythe Instagram, to have with my Lentil Dahl on Friday night. They were so amazing and easy, just chickpea flour, salt and water mixed together and thrown in a pan, fried for three minutes either side and bam! Done! Taste so good! I also added some spices and nooch to jazz them up. I noticed that James also recommended that they work as gluten free vegan pizza bases too, and so we set about to have a Saturday pizza night.
During relaxed Covid times post lockdown, we bought a pizza stone. We saw it in the foodie section of a big garden centre on a day trip out to said centre. Back when the lockdown rules were relaxed and we used a trip to a garden centre as our ‘day out’ experience.
Upon seeing said pizza stone we got so excited! We both love pizza and we were buzzing at the idea of making our own pizzas – every weekend right? We were going to practically turn into pizza we would make SO MUCH PIZZA.
About a month, maybe more after buying it we finally used it once…and had obviously never used it again. Until the weekend just gone!
We’ve become so much more aware of what we eat and our potion sizes that we just didn’t allow ourselves to make pizza every weekend. Plus, who uses a pizza stone that much? It’s such a novelty really. Anyway I tried making the flatbread (pizza stone in the oven heating up) and added Italian herbs and nooch too. Topped it with my homemade tomato base, sun-dried tomatoes, plant based mince which we make up like ‘spicy beef’ cuz Ryan loves it and creamy organic mozerella style vegan cheese. And obviously rocket, and siracha mayo because it pluses everything.
Genuinely I feel like I’ve tried all the homemade pizza bases to be fair, this was before the pizza stone came into our lives, and they’re just all a bit average. The best I had wasn’t homemade and it was the Bfree ready made gluten free vegan base you can buy in the supermarket. It’s prettt decent but still a little dry.
For some reason this chickpea flatbread is soft, moist, flavoursome and more important holds well so you can actually hold your slice of pizza if you want to. Heaven! For me – this is the most perfect vegan gluten free pizza base.
Here’s how you make them:
I’m always experimenting and trialling different things as I live this ‘gluten avoiding’ vegan life. One of the issues is a lot of gluten free recipes still use egg, cuz it works. But that doesn’t work for my veganism so it’s challenging to find the right swaps and replacements but also keeping things wholesome and free of chemicals and weird ingredients. Shop bought gluten free breads are often full of strange preservatives and rising agents and sadly just taste like sawdust. Bfree as a brand are one of the better ones but I still believe that homemade is best. When it’s homemade you know what you put in it 100% and you can avoid any dangerous ingredients, keep it organic and my big thing these days is to cut out refined sugars.
Anyway! I digress… the consensus is if you’re looking for a great gluten free vegan pizza base this is the easiest, best texture and hold and best taste, hands down!