A different kind of pizza and beer

If you’ve read my profile, you’d know I love beer. Especially dark beer. So this gluten free thing kind of makes that hard. However, I have found a few “beers” that are gluten free, and I tried one that was recommended to me by a good friend of ours from home.

I’ll get to that later. First, I wanted to talk about the pizza.

I tried to make pizza today using Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free pizza crust. And when I say tried, I really mean TRIED. I’m not sure if it worked, since it was my first time using a gluten free recipe, but I went along with it anyway.

The dough is very sticky. I know, there’s no gluten in it silly! It’s not going to be like regular dough! But I wasn’t sure what the hell I was getting myself into, and I thought for sure that I screwed it up. But I read other blogs that used this dough and apparently I was on the right track.

I stirred everything up like the directions said and tried to spread it out on a cookie sheet. I was supposed to divide it into two balls but I figured I’d just make one larger pizza and just have some leftovers for tomorrow.

It didn’t look thick at all so I just figured it would be fine.

 
You can see the consistency here and how strange it is. But I didn’t give up! It tells you to bake for 7-9 minutes before adding any toppings, so I split the difference and baked for 8. I added the sauce (more on that later) and cheese and baked again for 20 more minutes.

However the crust rose while it was cooking, so it didn’t cook all the way through. I had to put it back in for another 25 minutes before I was able to feel comfortable eating it.

 

I really wanted to like this, but it really wasn’t that good. It wasn’t BAD…it just wasn’t great. I’m going to give this crust another try, but next time I’ll be sure to divide the dough half like it says, and hopefully it will cook better for me.

And poor Dennis! He was willing to give this a shot. He actually found the mix at the store, pointed it out and said, “Hey, you want to try this for dinner tomorrow?” I really wanted it to be good for him since he was being so supportive towards it. He felt bad that it didn’t work too. Oh well, maybe next time.

Ok so onto the sauce---I used Smitten Kitchen’s Tomato Sauce with Onions and Butter and as per HEAB’s suggestion, I used Kerrygold butter (you are so right about this butter…it’s so good!) but only used 4 tbsp instead of 5, and added some basil from our basil plant. I liked the sauce but Dennis didn’t; he said it lacked flavor and thought it was just too plain. I have plans for the leftover sauce for lunch tomorrow. (I could tell you about it now but…nah you can wait) The sauce is very simple, just as the recipe says, and I think I’ll have an even better opinion about it tomorrow since I used more than half of it on this pizza.

And lastly, the beer.

Our friend Beth suggested drinking this:

It’s gluten free beer from Anheuser-Busch. You can read more about it here.
It wasn’t bad. I am a lover of dark beer and this was pretty light. I'm kind of a beer snob, so the fact that I didn’t love this beer isn’t a surprise.  It had kind of a sweet taste to it, almost like a very light cidery taste. But I did find it to be rather refreshing, and I didn’t feel gross after I drank it. Score!

The moral of the story?

Our taste buds need time to get used to any kind of change. If this is something that I really think I need to stick with, then I will have to work around things. Luckily there are plenty of things out there that are gluten free that I’m already used to eating. I’ll keep trying new things and gauging how I feel. I will continue to read reviews and take other people’s suggestions. If I feel better then in the long run, then it will surely be worth it!