Veggie Meatza

on October 08, 2010

Today I want to introduce you to the delight known as Veggie Meatza. Actually, I’m not sure whether others also know it as this. They may just call it “some meat with veggies on top” or something equally tasteless. But you, my loyal reader, will take after me and start calling this recipe “Veggie Meatza,” for that is what it is and has always been since I started calling it that last week.

Your vegetarian friends will look at you suspiciously as if you were trying to pull a fast one on them. Your Standard American Diet friends will ask you why you don’t just eat a normal pizza like a normal person. Your low-carb friends will ask you why your veggie meatza has no dairy. Your paleo friends will applaud your command of subtle irony even though subtle irony has nothing to do with the paleo diet in any specific way. Finally, your inexplicably thin vegan friends will turn sideways and disappear along the y-axis, where they’ll meet up with your imaginary friends. (These would be your most “complex friendships,” if you will.)

However, you, my loyal reader, will ignore all your friends and simply enjoy the following dish:

 

 

First, credit where credit is due: the inspiration for this fully paleo version of meatza came from Justin Owings’ post about a more conventional meatza. The recipe for the crust is essentially the same, but if you are dairy-free like myself, then you obviously can’t load up on cheese. Additionally, if you’re gluten-free like myself, you also can’t trust the excessively orange pepperoni from the grocery store. So what are you going to do? Well, what I did was go to Sprouts (an alternative farmers’ market-type grocery store) and just get whatever vegetables were on sale that week (and then pretend like I intended to use those and only those vegetables all along).

So to sum up, here are the ingredients. For the crust:

• 2 lbs ground beef. Free-range grass-fed beef is preferred for philosophical reasons, but it will taste about the same with “normal” extra lean ground beef. You can also mix in a little bit of other ground meats for variety, but it needs to be mostly beef for the texture to come out right.
• Lots of spices. You can pretty much freestyle here—I just mixed together random quantities of the following:
  • A pinch of salt
  • Garlic powder
  • Cayenne pepper
  • Ginger powder
  • Ground black pepper
  • A pinch of nutmeg
  • Caraway seeds. Like Justin Owings says, caraway seeds are really the magic ingredient here, so don’t skimp on these.
  • Oregano
  • Parsley flakes
• 2 eggs
• 1 tbsp honey (I just start pouring and eyeball it, so 1 tbsp is an estimate)

For the toppings (again, I used these because they were on sale… I’m sure you could use any vegetables and it would work fine. Although the zucchini and yellow squash “slices” do add a nice visual to the finished product.):

• Zucchini
• Yellow squash
• Onion
• Red bell pepper
• Coconut oil for the sautéing. You can use any oil you want, but I’ve taken a liking to coconut oil.
• Pasta sauce. I used a gluten-free veggie mix from HEB (local dominant grocery chain; think Shoprite, Safeway etc.) If you were really adventurous, you could try to make your own, but that would be an entirely separate recipe.

Preparation:

1. Preheat oven to 375 F
2. Prepare a baking tray with a baking sheet (or you can skip the baking sheet if your baking tray is really advanced and nice—mine isn’t so the baking sheet makes for fast cleanup)
3. Mix all the spices in a separate bowl. This tip is from Justin Owings’ blog post; it’s basically because your hands are all greasy and sticky after working the meat, eggs, and honey together, so it’s convenient to have a pre-prepared bowl of spices to just dump in.
4. Get a large mixing bowl and dump the meat in. Crack open the two eggs and throw those in too. Add the honey on top.
5. Mix it all together until it’s uniform, then add the bowl of spices and continue mixing until everything is uniform again.
6. Dump the mixture onto the pan and begin spreading it out like a crust. It’s important to note that you need to get the crust really thin (but not so thin that there are holes). This is mostly from experience: if you leave the crust too thick, it will just expand/rise into meatloaf, and people will just say that it’s meat with veggies on top. So don’t let that happen to you.
7. Put it in the oven, which should be pre-heated by now. It’ll be in there for about 20 minutes.
8. During this time, chop up the vegetables and sauté them in a pan. You basically have to cook them fully, as if you weren’t going to bake them at all.
9. When the crust is ready, you’ll want to take it out and remove the “beef stuff” on the edges. I think this is technically fat and you are welcome to eat it, but that’s not really the point of meatza, so I just scoop it up with a spoon and chuck it.
10. Spread the pasta sauce on top and add your veggie toppings.
11. Put it all back in the oven for 5-10 minutes. Just watch it to make sure it’s not going over. 5 minutes should be enough in most cases.
12. Enjoy!

Well, that’s it for Veggie Meatza—I hope you try it out. Join me next time for spaghetti squash and meatballs (using much of the same ingredients, which is great if you—like me—bought a lot of these ingredients for the first time just to make some meatza). Oh, and I apologize to my vegan friends if you were offended by my joke. You are not really 2-dimensional nor are you in cahoots with imaginary numbers on the complex plane. You are still very thin, however.