Low Carb Cauliflower Pizza Semi-Fail

This afternoon I made my second attempt at making Low Carb Cauliflower Pizza. The first time it didn’t turn out too bad but I mistakenly used two eggs instead of one so the bottom was a little… eggy.  This time I tried a different approach.  I made some mistakes but now I think I know where I went wrong.

First I used my processor to shred the cauliflower and mozarella cheese.  Here is where I think I made my first mistake.  I cooked the cauliflower first and tried to squeeze the moisture out of it so it wouldn’t be too wet, but it still was a little.  I’ve heard from a number of people that using raw, shredded cauliflower works better so I will be doing that next time to see if it’s any better.

Then, as the directions said, I mixed in one beaten egg.  So far so good…

That left me with this, a wettish sort of dough blob.  It held it’s consistency pretty well but was also quite easy to pull apart. It certainly wasn’t like actual dough but it still appeared to be good enough for what I needed.

This is where the big mistakes started.  I didn’t have a cookie sheet or a pizza pan so I used baking paper to spread it out on.  I also spread it too thin.  I was worried that if I didn’t that it would stay too mushy in the middle and hoped it would become more crisp if it was thinner.

That really wasn’t the case at all.  It was terribly floppy and somewhat stuck to the paper so I had to pry it off with a spatula.  I then moved it to a sheet of tinfoil figuring that was closer to a pizza dish than paper was.  Maybe that would help.  So I went ahead and piled on the toppings.

I was told by a friend that what she does at this point is flip it over and put the other side under the grill to make it a little more crispy. I will be trying that next time as I think it would help a lot. I’ll also make it slightly thicker so that I’m able to actually flip it without it bending and breaking apart.

I put tomato puree, artichoke heart, mozarella, feta and a small amount of salami.  This is what I’d usually have on the pizza’s I’d buy frozen, so I wanted to compare. By this time I was starving and about a minute away from eating it raw. True story.

This is perhaps where I made my next mistake. I chose to just put it back in the oven for another 15 minutes rather than putting it under the grill just until the cheese melted.  It was still totally floppy and I think the base became even more moist than it was before I put the toppings on.  Damn it looked delicious though!  I moved it onto a cutting board and cut it into pieces which were far too floppy to eat by hand, but it made it look more pizza like as I ate it with my knife and fork.

It tasted really good, which is the most important part!  The edges were delicious and I just wish the entire base had come out like that.  I mean it LOOKED like pizza, it TASTED like pizza… it just didn’t FEEL like pizza.  That’s the bit that I have to try to correct somehow.

I know it will probably never be exactly like the pizza I used to have, because it’s not. Still though, I want to get this whole thing down so that it’s something I can easily repeat.  I looove pizza and if I can make my own low carb friendly version, I will – a lot!

I’m going to buy a proper pizza pan this week and give it another go, I’ll keep you posted!