This is how I made a pizza that’s compliant with the Mediterranean Diet. It starts with a Mediterranean pizza crust that stays as whole grain and unprocessed as possible. To make a decent textured pizza crust flour has to be involved as far as I’m concerned, and of course wheat flour has to be an important part of things. For this pizza I’m embracing my belief that it isn’t worth eating something carbohydrate heavy unless it has some decent nutritional value as well. To that end some flax is going into my recipe.
Notice I’ve chosen whole wheat flour, whereas when I’ve made normal pizzas in the past it was all about generic white flour. To make the crust just take 1 cup of warm water, 2 tablespoons of sugar, and a packet of yeast and mix them in a bowl, letting them sit for 30 minutes. This gets the yeast excited.
Next add in 2.5 cups of whole wheat flour, and a 1/4 cup of flax. These two ingredients alone are high in fiber, so this will be a very filling pizza crust when it is done. I use a Kitchenaid mixer to beat the hell out of my dough, but do whatever you want so long as it sucks up the yeast mixture from before, and then just walk away for an hour.
Return to the dough and add 1/4 teaspoon of salt, 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder, a tablespoon of olive oil, and mix. If the dough feels very dry at this point and won’t stick together then add small doses of water to it until it has a dough texture. If it feels too wet them simply add small amounts of flour. Walk away again, 30 minutes minimum, more time if you have it available, because this is where the dough really gets happy with the gluten and yeast working their magic.
At this point you have dough, which in my case I divided into two balls, and then worked into two crusts, one of which is shown here. Then I let that sit for 30 minutes to just rise a little on its own. This is where I mention I prefer a French rolling pin over the normal kind, but it doesn’t really matter, that’s just my opinion getting in here.
For Mediterranean Diet pizza toppings the goal is to be as compliant as possible by keeping to unprocessed foods. You can find your favorite compliant pasta sauce brand or just cook down some tomatoes on the stove top. Whatever works for you, and beyond that it’s a matter of vegetables, and ultimately mozzarella cheese. For this first attempt I selected olives, onions, bell peppers, tomatoes and even though not a vegetable there’s mushrooms for good measure. These are all likely things I’d have had on a generic pizza anyway. I wanted fresh basil for this but didn’t have access to any when I put this particular meal together. I also went light on the cheese because type of diet aside, I shoot for lower fat options. This got tossed in an oven at 400 degrees for 25 minutes.
The end result of my Mediterranean Diet Pizza was a fairly firm mostly wheat crust that was filling as predicted, tasted great, and let me have pizza with a very low guilt level.
