Gluten-Free Pizza Crust

I’ve made a few pizzas since I gave up wheat, and until tonight, all of them were bad. The deep-dish pizza last week was so bad that I scraped out and ate the toppings and threw the crust away. Yeah, it was that bad.

This one would not require apologies. It was crisp and only very slightly chewy, which is what I’m looking for in pizza crust. I generally go for thin crust. I just tried the deep dish because I thought it would be easier to manage. Without wheat gluten, dough tends to be hard to work. Anyway, I started with this recipe and then changed it. Here’s what I actually used:

Ingredients
• 1 cup tapioca flour
• 1/2 cup white rice flour
• 1/4 cup cornstarch
• 2/3 cup sorghum flour
• 1 teaspoon xanthum gum
• 1 teaspoon fine sea salt (would actually add more next time – it needed it)
• 1/2 cup whole milk
• 2 teaspoons active dry yeast, from 1 (1/4-ounce) package
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 3 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon extra-virgin olive oil

Directions
1. In bowl of electric mixer, whisk together tapioca flour, white rice flour, cornstarch, sorghum flour, xanthum gum, and salt.
2. Warm the milk and 1/4 cup to about 100 degrees. I used the soften butter setting on my microwave. Add the milk and egg to the mixer and mix with the dough hook, scraping down the sides if necessary. Knead, once it forms a ball, for about 1 minute.
3. Preheat to 400°F, preferably with a pizza stone.
4. Scrape half of dough onto each of 12″ square pieces of parchment and form each half into a ball. Coat each ball with 2 teaspoons oil, then use oiled fingertips to pat and stretch each ball into 10-12 inch diameter round, 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick Loosely cover rounds with plastic wrap and let rise in warm draft-free place for about 10 minutes, longer if you like your crust thicker.
5. Bake one crust at a time on the parchment paper on the stone until top is puffed and firm and underside is crisp, 5 to 10 minutes.
6. Remove to a cooling rack, heat oven to 500. Put toppings on pizza, when oven is hot enough, bake 8-10 minutes directly on the pizza stone.

I used sauce, 6-cheese italian blend, italian sausage, green peppers and onions. I was very happy with this pizza. It took a lot of restraint to not actually eat the whole thing.

I did not use garbanzo bean flour because I *hate* bean flours. They make me feel sick to my stomach when consumed, something I learned while low-carb dieting. I added more sorghum and tapioca flour because the dough was just way too wet to work with, and I know what rice flour is like, and it didn’t need more of that. The tapioca and sorghum flours are both new to me. I chose to buy them because I’ve seen recipes calling for tapioca flour and gluten-free beer is made with sorghum, so I figured that couldn’t be all bad.

In case you’ve never seen them, tapioca flour looks a lot like cornstarch, and sorghum looks like medium rye flour. I also bought potato flour today, but it was not used in this recipe.