Sweet Laurel Bakery co-owners, -authors, and mothers share a gluten- and dairy-free pizza recipe from their new cookbook 'Sweet Laurel Savory.'
This 5-ingredient recipe for gluten-, grain-, and dairy-free pizza comes from Sweet Laurel co-owners and -authors Laurel Galluci and Claire Thomas. It's a simple, easy recipe the two moms love to make with their kids—and they hope you enjoy, too!
On Play Me a Recipe, your favorite cooks will walk you through their most treasured recipes, offering all the insider tips, stories, and tricks you won't get from a written recipe—and you'll be right alongside them, every step of the way. Feel free to pause, jump back, or navigate the steps via the podcast chapters (if you're in Apple Podcasts, swipe up on the episode player page—the podcast chapters will be at the bottom).
If you're cooking along, here's the recipe we're making today. Go ahead and grab the ingredients below (Claire and Laurel starts listing them at 5:20) before starting the episode.
Margherita Pizza
makes one 10-inch pizza
Pizza Dough
makes one 10-inch crust
Sicilian Tomato Sauce
makes 3 cups
Dairy-Free Mozzarella
makes 1 cup
Is there a recipe you'd like to hear us make? Email it to us at podcasts@food52.com!
Lobby Time Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Claire Thomas: Consistently for Sweet Laurel, our recipes are what we like to call dump and stir.
Laurel Gallucci: Yes.
Laurel: Hi, this is Play Me a Recipe and I'm Laurel Gallucci.
Claire: And I'm Claire Thomas, and we're the owners of Sweet Laurel coming to you from our kitchen in LA.
Laurel: Today we'll be making margherita pizza from our new cookbook Sweet Laurel Savory, which is linked in the show notes and on Food52.com.
Claire: But we'll be gathering ingredients, slicing, dicing, baking, everything alongside each other. So feel free to pause or jump back using the podcast chapters if you need a little more time.
Laurel: For ingredients and equipment, you'll need a bowl, parchment paper, and a rolling pin.
Claire: So to me, the first thing that I find funny about that is when you think pizza, you think of someone flying pizza above their head. This is not that.
Laurel: No.
Claire: And this is the important thing, why? The recipe is for margherita pizza, but it is margherita pizza with a difference. And that big difference is...
Laurel: This is gluten-free grain-free dairy-free pizza.
Claire: Yeah. (laughing) It's like none of the things that you'd expect having pizza, but it's absolutely delicious, and the whole cookbook is actually savory baking dishes that are without grains, which presents challenges, you know?
Laurel: Yes.
Claire: Yeah. But for pizza, I feel like this was one that actually came together pretty quickly, because some of the recipes I was really sweating about, like bagels. When we were developing a grain-free bagel, I was so nervous, but it turned out great.
Laurel: But you nerded out over it.
Claire: I nerded out, and we had like 50 iterations of bagels to get to the--the bagel. Um, but it worked out. And so for pizza, Laurel, let's talk a little bit about how we started with this recipe.
Laurel: Yeah, so um, pizza is actually really important to both Claire and I. Um, we wanted to take it a step further, and you know, of course it's grain-free, dairy-free, gluten-free, but this pizza dough is also vegan, and um, it's vegan because we use something really special in it called coconut yogurt, which is one of our favorite ingredients to use. But, um, you know, it's a really simple approach and that's a pillar at Sweet Laurel, is keeping things simple. And so, um, in this cookbook we have trimmed down our ingredient list and we--you know, in our first cookbook we used, we had a five core ingredient principle. Similar in Savory, we've got this trimmed down ingredient list, and this recipe really highlights some of those.
Claire: What I love about this recipe is, pizza is one of those things that I'm like, "Oh, that sounds so fun," and then I will never do it. I'll do it once and then--and then like my kitchen looks like a bomb went off, because I'm like, "Who do I think I am," with this like, balls of dough everywhere, and like...
Laurel: It's a lot.
Claire: It's crazy, and so I just feel like pizza is one of those things that is a little intimidating for a home cook. Like it sounds amazing, but then the doing of it is a little hard. But what I love about this recipe is it actually is a weeknight recipe.
Laurel: Oh yeah. We're making it every Friday night at our house at this point. And the cool thing about this dough is you can make it ahead, roll it out and freeze it.
Claire: I love that.
Laurel: And, you know, you can make a pizza in a jiffy.
Claire: It's not delivery, it's Sweet Laurel Savory. Yeah. I love it. Well, let's get to the making of it. So the simple base of this--this is the joke is that I was nervous when we were doing the Food52 interview, that I'm like, "Oh, it's gonna be a five minute interview," (laughing) cause the recipe's, like...
Laurel: It's so simple.
Claire: Consistently for Sweet Laurel, our recipes are what we like to call "dump and stir."
Laurel: Yes.
Claire: But yeah, what I love so much about these recipes, and this is--same for the first cookbook as well, is that it's actually easier than the thing you would typically be making.
Laurel: Absolutely. Yes.
Claire: I feel like with grain-free and gluten-free baking, people sometimes expect it to be even fussier and more annoying and like, challenging. But this is a great example of it not being that at all.
Laurel: Yeah. And this is going to be one of those recipes where you're like, "How is it that my five year old can make this?" Because it's--what I love about a lot of our recipes is like, age does not hold anyone back. A five year old could literally make this recipe. In fact, my 3 and a half, almost four year old, helps me make it all the time.
Claire: I love it.
Laurel: So it's super simple. One bowl, that's all you need, and um, five ingredients.
Claire: I love it. Alright, well let's get into it. So first things first is we have the oven preheated to 500, or honestly, as high as your oven will go. Like, 500 is most of most people. I have like a weird oven from the fifties that just like, I don't know, it just cranks, so it's probably like 1000 degrees. Um, if you have a pizza stone, use it. Gives you that amazing crunchy crust. If you don't, our kind of hack for that is you take a baking sheet, turn it upside down, and put it onto your oven rack and let that preheat. So it's not going to have the same heat quality as a baking stone, but it is going to give you that really great crispy crust. So it's a good little tweak.
Laurel: Yeah. Little hack.
Claire: Yeah. So walk us through the ingredients, Laurel.
Laurel: Yeah, so this recipe has a cup and a half of almond flour, and then we have a cup of arrowroot powder, a half a teaspoon of Himalayan pink salt, and then a quarter cup of coconut yogurt and half a cup of almond milk. And um, we do have one little tip here. If you do not have coconut yogurt handy, you can actually just use a quarter cup of coconut milk or almond milk and squeeze a little lemon into it and get that same effect.
Claire: I love it. Yeah, that same little tartness. So one of the consistent things that we were trying for in this cookbook is, "How do you get the flavor of something that's risen, like a sourdough flavor, when you haven't actually risen it?" And yogurt became like our secret sauce throughout.
Laurel: Yeah. It's one of our favorite.
Claire: It also adds--like that act, the fermentation adds this amazing lightness. So this pizza dough does have like that really nice bubbly lightness to it, which is so delicious.
Laurel: And something I like to do with this one is actually make it maybe even a couple of hours before I'm intending to bake it, and then it sours even more as you let it sit on the counter, which is really cool. And that's kind of consistent with true pizza dough.
Claire: I love that. Well, it's the yogurt. Especially if you--we have a recipe for coconut yogurt in the cookbook. If you're making the coconut yogurt, it is one of those things that the longer it sits there, the more sour it gets. And I mean, so how do we put it together?
Laurel: Yeah, so literally we're just going to add all of our dry ingredients in this bowl. So we have our cup and a half of almond flour.
Claire: Almond flour...I'll wait for the bag.
Laurel: Almond flour, a cup of arrowroot powder.
Claire: So almond flour plus arrowroot is a really common combination you're going to see in our recipes, and the reason why is arrowroot has this amazing moisture and texture to it. The flavor is really nice as well, for the almond flour. Um, and then arrowroot kind of gives it that chewiness that you are missing from almond flour. Like almond flour is very short, but the arrowroot gives it a little bit of gluten kind of vibe.
Laurel: Yeah, I think the two together kind of gives us like a yang yang type situation, with like, we're trying to get a couple of different textures here.
Claire: Yeah.
Laurel: It really helps. Um, now we're gonna add half a teaspoon of pink salt, and now that we have our dry ingredients together, we're literally just going to mix those all together so that everything's all mixed in. So the arrowroot, the pink salt, the almond flour, all mixed really nicely together. We like to use a whisk for this. And then once that's mixed together, we're just going to add our coconut yogurt and our almond milk.
Claire: Nice. And for that, we're switching from a whisk to a rubber spatula, just so you don't have to get your fingers dirty, but--
Laurel: Exactly.
Claire: It's so straightforward.
Laurel: Yeah. Very easy.
Claire: Very easy.
Laurel: It might be easier, actually.
Claire: I love it.
Laurel: So here's our coconut yogurt. I actually made this earlier today, so it's...
Claire: (laughing) Oh, I was about to say, it's kind of like...that's a thin yogurt, that's going in here.
Laurel: (laughing) It didn't sit in the fridge as long as it normally would.
Claire: It's more that you're adding moisture to it, and that's what matters.
Laurel: And like, that flavor.
Claire: The sourness. Yeah, that's the key. That's the key.
Laurel: And then we're just going to mix this all together.
Claire: Alright.
Laurel: Do you want to mix it, Claire?
Claire: Sure, give me something to do. Right now, I'm just like--all I'm doing is hanging around and harassing Laurel while she puts together the pizza dough.
Laurel: (laughing) And then um--so I don't know, I don't think we mentioned this, but we're after we mix this dough together, we're gonna put it onto two sheets of parchment paper.
Claire: Like a sandwich of parchment paper.
Laurel: Yeah. And so we want the parchment--a sheet of parchment down. We're going to slap the dough in the middle of it, and then put that second piece of parchment on, and you can roll it out with either a rolling pin--if you don't have a rolling pin you can use a can, whatever you have on hand.
Claire: Wine bottle.
Laurel: Wine bottle.
Claire: Wine bottle is the one.
Laurel: That would work a lot better than a can.
Claire: I've used that so many times. (laughing) That is the key.
Laurel: The fun thing about this recipe is um, you can you could make it into a circle, you could make it into a square, you could make it into a heart shape.
Claire: (laughing) This is turning into a Dr. Seuss poem.
Laurel: Yeah, well, I mean, you can tell I make this with a four year old.
Claire: In a--in a--with a--with a fox, in a box. (laughing)
Laurel: And you can make a little lip for a crust. And um, we do really like to pre-bake the crust before adding toppings.
Claire: That is like a little--sort of our our, like, little tip.
Laurel: Yeah.
Claire: Is that like, you can--in the cookbook, you--we basically say, "Go right ahead, just like, dump everything on it, that's fine." But we do like doing the little pre-bake, because you end up getting-- and if you--especially if you want, like, I think you and I are kind of like, thin crust girls, if we're being honest. So like, doing the extra like, crispiness.
Laurel: Yeah.
Claire: So I mixed the dough together, and it's interesting because when I was first mixing it, I was nervous, because I was like, "Oh it looks very liquidy, uh oh, what's going on?" And now after mixing it--like, so here's the beauty of it being grain-free. There's no such thing as over-mixing because there's no gluten to overwork, so you can just mix it as much as you want. Um but yeah, after you mix it, you actually notice, it really does start to come together. And that's partially because of the arrowroot. Um, the arrowroot as it gets wet, it actually kind of gets activated. So you end up seeing the arrowroot really working to kind of hold everything together, and giving us that sort of gluten-esque quality.
Laurel: Yes.
Claire: Hey, this looks beautiful. And here's the great thing. You don't have to wait. Like, usually in a pizza recipe, this is where you say like, "Put in a warm na-na-na for 90 minutes." Like, you don't have to do any of that, you just like, immediately can do it. Okay, so we now have laid out our parchment paper and we're dumping our dough on there. And this makes like--this is a big pizza.
Laurel: It's a big pizza.
Claire: This is a big pizza. You could do two mini pizzas.
Laurel: You could do two minis or a large one, yeah.
Claire: Yeah. We pride ourselves on using a very minimal amount of kitchen utensils, kitchen tools, and being kind of not fussy. I feel like our entire operation would come to a halt if like, out of nowhere the headline says "Parchment paper removed from the planet."
Laurel: Oh my gosh. Like, that would be a very sad day.
Claire: That would be--Sweet Laurel would have to close. (laughing)
Laurel: I know when I'm personally out of parchment paper, it's like--at my house I like, pretty much can't do anything. It's like my hands are tied behind my back.
Claire: Oh my gosh! So talk a little bit about parchment paper. And, we obviously are using it in this recipe to roll out our dough. You will find that throughout the Sweet Laurel Savory cookbook, we are using parchment paper to roll our dough. So what is it about the parchment paper that makes it so key?
Laurel: Yeah. So we--with the parchment paper, typically when we're rolling out dough, we sandwich the dough between two pieces of parchment and then roll it out, and this makes it so it doesn't stick to everything. It's not a sticky, icky mess. You don't have to flour your rolling pin, and it literally rolls off so easily when--before you need to bake, you know, say you're making the pizza dough or a tart crust or whatever. You know, you roll out your dough and then you remove that top piece of parchment paper and go on to your next step. And it's essential for things not sticking to each other. And then also, it does make for an easier cleanup.
Claire: It really does. I mean, even in this case, we're doing something really unique, which is, you're moving the pizza dough on the parchment directly onto the stone, which is very uncommon. Like you would usually just take the dough and put the dough directly onto the stone. But for us, the parchment is really key because when you're doing grain-free gluten-free baking, the textures are actually completely opposite to what you're used to. So, for instance, like, in conventional baking, when you're making pizza dough, you're kneading it enough so that the gluten develops so you get this incredible stretch and it's very buoyant. So you can stretch that pizza dough. This is not a stretchy dough. It actually has more the texture of like, as if you're baking like, a very thick muffin or banana bread or something. So you can't play with it the same way. So in our book, we have an entire section on kind of the dos and don'ts of grain-free baking, and most of it is based on the idea of like, expectations, and kind of removing them.
Laurel: Yeah, it's not like the other version.
Claire: Exactly.
Laurel: Yeah.
Claire: Yeah. And so for our pizza dough, because it is quite wet, that parchment paper is so helpful because it just means that you don't have to create--that you're not creating a gloopy mess. It makes life so much easier. And how do you--okay, so we're putting the parchment on top, we're rolling it out. How thin do you like it?
Laurel: I like it pretty thin, to be completely honest. I really like it thin, and then at the edges I like to make a little lip manually. I think that adds a really nice, um, you know, little--it makes it really pretty. And also, the crisp--like, I'm the person who like, everyone saves their crust for me at the dinner table. So, um...
Claire: I love that.
Laurel: Yeah, especially when it's grain-free only. (laughing) But if they're eating gluten pizza, I don't eat their crust, but...
Claire: Amazing.
Laurel: Yeah. This this is a fun one for that.
Claire: Alright, so while our oven is preheating and our crust is ready, we're going to wash up, so we'll see you guys in a second.
Laurel: This is Play Me a Recipe. I'm Laurel Gallucci.
Claire: And I'm Claire Thomas, and we're the owners of Sweet Laurel, and today we're making our grain-free margherita pizza.
Laurel: Let's top this pizza.
Claire: Yeah, I'm excited about it.
Laurel: So tell us about the sauce.
Claire: Yes. So this--this pizza is ready to be topped with whatever you want to top it with. Um, we have a couple of versions in the cookbook that we really love. We have a pizza bianca, we have like a veggie pizza. My favorite is the classic margherita, which is what we're making today. So the base of the sauce, you can use tomato sauce that you have at home. The one we have in the cookbook is kind of a Sicilian variation, and the thing to me that makes it Sicilian are the little baby, kind of tweaks that really add this amazing punch of flavor. So for instance, you have your classic olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, canned tomatoes, and tomato paste as the base. And then for the flavoring the rosemary, basil, clove, and then red pepper flakes with a touch of maple syrup. Because we don't use sugar, so we're using a little maple syrup. Those elements give it this amazing, just bite. So the clove adds that almost like Sichuan pepper kind of quality to it. Um, a little bit of a spiciness, and then the rosemary is that earthy, almost like resin kind of quality. So it just makes it this really punchy, deep, rich sauce that I personally can't get enough of it. I really love it.
Laurel: So yummy.
Claire: So that's the main sauce. But then the other topics are really simple. It's buffalo mozzarella and basil. And I want to talk about buffalo mozzarella because--
Laurel: It's near and dear to my heart.
Claire: Oh my gosh! So a little bit of a backstory on Laurel and I, and Sweet Laurel. So Sweet Laurel was founded because Laurel came down with Hashimoto's, a very aggressive autoimmune disease, and healed her way through food. When we formed Sweet Laurel--I've actually never had any dietary restrictions. So for me, like I've always been able to eat whatever kind of cheese, whether it's like, a super garbagey Cheez Whiz or like a beautiful handmade cheese, I've never had an issue with dairy. So when we were doing pizza, I was so excited to find out that you found a cheese you can do.
Laurel: Oh yeah, yeah. So I discovered buffalo mozzarella when we were on our babymoon, um, in Italy when we were pregnant with my first baby. And honestly, I had no idea that buffalo mozzarella has like, the tiniest trace amounts of lactose in it. It's pretty much lactose-free on paper. And so we were in Italy, and my nutritionist had said, "You know, you're on your babymoon, you should try some stuff." And I just fell in love with the buffalo mozzarella. I probably had it for breakfast, lunch and dinner like five days in a row.
Claire: It explains why Nico has just like such beautiful--
Laurel: The paws. (laughing)
Claire: Oh my gosh, she's got these chubby mozzarella paws.
Laurel: Yes. And so it became instantly my favorite cheese. And then when I found out that it was basically lactose free, I was like, "This is going to be my new thing." The amazing thing about buffalo mozzarella is on a pizza, it gives it that true beautiful melt. It looks gorgeous. It tastes amazing, like it's supposed to, and um, you know, you don't have to worry about the dairy.
Claire: It's great. I mean, I'm--I'm excited about that. Like, one of the things for this cookbook was that we try to provide a lot of options. So we have vegan cheese, including a vegan mozzarella, which I am so impressed with the melt on it, because the melt on the vegan mozzarella is really impressive. You actually can get kind of a cheese pull from it, which I think is very awesome.
Laurel: And it's cassava-based, which I never would have thought.
Claire: Yeah! Exactly. But it is one of those things too where if your body can handle something that is, uh, like--I guess it's funny, it's dairy, but it's dairy-free, because most of the--most of the time people are reacting to the dairy and the lactose. But um, so using things like buffalo mozzarella or buffalo milk-based products. Also ghee, where you know, the milk solids--exactly--are pulled from the butter. Um, we're able to kind of play around with those ingredients as well.
Laurel: Yeah.
Claire: So here's the thing to building a perfect pizza. Everybody wants to overdo it, everybody wants to do and--say like, 50% more toppings than you actually should. But when it comes to the actual sauce, you use so little. You almost just wanna kiss it with like a tiny bit of sauce, and then you put the slices of the mozzarella on top.
Laurel: Less is more.
Claire: Exactly, because the truth is, you don't want that goopy puddle in the middle. I actually--I gotta be honest, that's like my least favorite thing about Neopolitan pizza, is it gets all--it gets all goopy in the middle.
Laurel: And you have to eat it with a fork and a knife, right?
Claire: I don't--I hate that so much.
Laurel: (laughing) It's terrible. Why a fork and a knife?
Claire: It goes against my American...(laughing) My, I can't do it. So yes, this is like more of a...I guess, like slightly more Brooklyn, in the sense that you should be able to pick it up--
Laurel: You can actually pick it up.
Claire: The pizza should have a point that like, stays to true north, instead of dipping in your hand and creating a mess. Um, alright, great. So we're doing a very small amount of the sauce on top, and I just like to use the back of a spoon, like a ladle to do this. The sauce is great too, it freezes really well. You can make it ahead, obviously. So the cool thing is, by the end of this, making this pizza could actually take literally 10 seconds.
Laurel: 100%.
Claire: Because if you've made the pizza dough and frozen it, if you've made it ahead of time, if the sauce is made ahead of time, you really don't--it takes so little effort to assemble it, which is wonderful.
Laurel: Great.
Claire: And so it does bake for a little longer than like a traditional pizza, because usually when you put a pizza in a pizza oven it's around 8 to 10 minutes. This bakes in about 12 to 15, depending on the oven, depending on the pizza stone.
Laurel: Yeah. It's really more because of the dough.
Claire: Exactly. So I would definitely keep an eye on it though. It's one of those things where, if you look at it and it's getting beautiful and brown on the tops, and you know, the crust is looking really good, get a spatula, lift it up, check the bottom. If underneath is starting to get some really nice spotting, you know you're in business. So for instance, as I said earlier, I have a crazy oven. So things cook--like this would be like, an eight minute pizza in my oven, but in a normal oven it might be like, the full 15.
Claire: Very nice. Alright, so it is out of the oven. It looks amazing. It looks gorgeous. So here's a question. Are you like a fresh basil after the fact girl, or like a basil going in with it?
Laurel: In.
Claire: In? All those oils come out.
Laurel: Totally. I actually watched, um, like a thing about all the best places to eat margherita pizza in Napoli.
Claire: Oh wow.
Laurel: And they put it in before they bake it. So I was like, "Well, that's how it's done."
Claire: There you go. If the Napolese are doing it that way, you can't--I mean, that's basically the authority on it at that point, right? (laughing) That's amazing. Alright, well cheers, Laurel! This is--this looks fantastic. I love--the edging is like, crusty and beautiful.
Laurel: So yummy.
Claire: The mozzarella is creating those gorgeous white puddles all over. There's not too much of sauce, which makes me happy. And then I--I mean you could use a pizza cutter. I prefer just using a chef's knife. I think that's so much easier. And then the way I like to serve it is with a drizzle of olive oil and lots of freshly cracked black pepper, and then maybe if you want to do some chili flake. But just, like, really just go go to town.
Laurel: Yup.
Claire: Absolutely beautiful. And then in the photo, I gotta say the photo of this spread is probably--here, I'm going to go to it--it's probably one of my favorite photos in the entire book. So beautiful. Um, the stylist we worked with, her name is Kate Martindale. She worked with us on our last cookbook. She's so talented, and she had this idea of doing flowers, but in Savory as well, because our brand is so known for floral as being part of the aesthetic. So we had all these blooming herbs that just got sprinkled on everything. So if you happen to have any blooming chive or oregano or thyme or rosemary...
Laurel: Basil.
Claire: Just go for it. Just throw those flowers on top and you're gonna get like a beautiful, beautiful looking plate.
Laurel: So yummy.
Claire: That's so good. This was so fun!
Laurel: Yeah! And thanks so much for joining us today on Play Me a Recipe. This recipe is linked in the show notes and on Food52.com. And you can find us at Sweet Laurel Bakery, or at www.sweetlaurel.com. Happy baking!
Claire: Happy baking!