Evil Dead Pizzas

Okay, so pizza isn't really evil. Well, not my pizza, anyway. Last night I had a few friends over for horror movies and vegan yummies. It was rather fun to be having pizza and beer and still being all awesome and vegan.

I'm not one to use soy cheese normally. Once I went vegan, I just started to make food differently and I don't even miss cheese. Whenever I have bought some, I have to try and figure out what exactly to do with it. I've started to buy soy cheese slices whenever I want to make McVegans, but that's pretty much it. Because I wasn't really sure what kind would be best on pizza, I bought two different soy mozzarellas and put one on each pizza. I forgot to take pictures of the pizza before we started eating, unfortunately.

I made pizza crust and pizza sauce from Vegan with a Vengeance. The only thing I tweaked was to use whole wheat pastry flour instead of plain white flour in the pizza crust. The two cheeses I used were Vegan Rella and Vegan Gourmet. I think Vegan Gourmet is the Canadian version of Follow Your Heart cheese. It said so proudly on the package "It Melts!", but that little exclamation point wasn't enough to make it actually melt as you can see.

The Vegan Rella ended up melting too much. It was dripping all over our hands and plate. And I was told "I can't get it off my teeth." I didn't care for the flavor of this one as much as the other either. I didn't really mind the not melting so much. It didn't take away from the taste at all.

The first pizza had the VWAV sauce, Vegan Rella, Yves veggie pepperonis and roasted red pepper. The second pizza had VWAV sauce, VWAV pesto, a layer of Vegan Gourmet cheese, sauteed portabello mushrooms, roasted red pepper and tomatoes. Adding the layer of pesto with the sauce was such a great idea. The second pizza was the best of the two, hands down.

I've had a few people ask how to roast red peppers, so I'm adding the instructions for that. It's so easy and well worth it. Red peppers are awesome on so many things. You can put them on sandwiches, pasta, salads, pizza...

Roasted Red Peppers

First you want to cut the peppers. I usually cut them in half and then cut the halves into thirds. Make sure to knock out the seeds and cut out the white parts. It's easiest to get the white parts out after you've cut the pepper. Do it like this:

Put about 2 teaspoons olive oil into a bowl and add the pepper pieces. Toss them around until they've all been coated. Not like hot oil wrestling, just a little bit. Place the peppers on a cookie sheet skin side up. The broiler in my current apartment doesn't work, but if yours does you can turn on the broiler. Otherwise, heat your oven to 550. Make sure to place one of the oven racks as high up as you can if you're using the broiler. Once your oven has preheated, put the cookie sheet of peppers on that top rack if you're broiling, or in the middle if your oven is lame like mine. You want to cook the peppers until the skins start to char a little. I think I left mine in for about 15 minutes. You want them to look something like this:

After you take the peppers out of the oven, let them cool for a few minutes and then put them in a bowl or a colander and rinse them with very cold water. This stops the cooking and helps to separate the skins so you can pull them off. Don't worry, they really do peel away quite easily.

Yum! Now you can refrigerate these until you're ready to use them.

Coming soon - Vegan Rice Crispy treats and Hot Monkey Pile.