Vegan pizza
Today we went to St. Johns, which turned out pretty well. It’s pretty much the only big-ish city in Newfoundland, and we found a nice little vegetarian restaurant there called The Sprout. I had a lentil burger, which was alright (a little dry), but they also had a curried chickpea dish, which was just delightful. They also had some vegan deserts, which were pretty great. After that, we went on to a Dominion grocery store, which was pretty impressive. The place is more or less the size of a Wal-Mart, but almost entirely devoted to foodstuffs. They have a natural foods section that could almost put Whole Foods to shame, and I was able to pick up some Amy’s prepackaged dinners (here’s hoping they’ll turn out good), some soy yogurt, soy ice cream, and granola. But most importantly, we found that they had Follow Your Heart’s Vegan Gourmet Mozarella, and some frozen semi-fresh pizza dough (vegan) in the bakery section. So I picked up a block of the cheese, a couple of crusts, some veggie pepperonis, and went about making a vegan pizza tonight.
The pizza, admittedly, didn’t turn out great, but it was good to have something a little junky (although relatively healthful, compared to dairy cheese and meat pepperoni) and cheesy to munch on. I put the entire block of cheese on it (my first mistake), piled on the pepperonis, and stuck it in the oven. The Vegan Gourmet cheese, unfortunately, can be awfully difficult to melt, and after 12 minutes in the oven at 450F, the stuff was still perfectly solid, so I went ahead and threw the broiler on high. The cheese started to melt pretty quickly, but the crust also started to blacken, and when I finally turned the oven off, most of the cheese had melted, although the center was still pretty solid, but most of the crust was also charred. And the kicker? The bottom of the pizza crust was still mushy. Such is the dilemma of cooking with vegan cheese.
All that being said, the pizza was really tasty. It wasn’t perfect, but it was definitely as close as I’ve ever gotten, and the Vegan Gourmet stuff really does taste like mozarella (or at least as near as I can tell, not having eaten the real stuff for the better part of a year now). I only wish I’d stuck the pepperonis under the cheese, as they got a little too crispy for my taste. The package had two frozen crusts, as well, so tomorrow methinks I’m going to make another one of these, but this time I’m just going to cover the whole thing with pineapple. That should make it a little easier to bake, and it’ll still be plenty tasty when it comes out of the oven: who says pizza needs cheese?
After that, we went for a little walk down by the rocks, and I had some great fun leaping around various rock formations (thankfully not to my death, although there were a few close scrapes). Tomorrow I’m heading off to hopefully get closer to some puffins: I’m still hunting that elusive puffin headshot. For now, though, methinks I’m going to reheat some of that pizza.