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Deep-Dish Gluten-Free Pizza Florentine Alfredo
Description
For those who want to live forever and achieve heaven on earth, God created all the ingredients for Pizza Florentine Alfredo. Now, to make your life complete, I shall teach you how to combine them to create a masterpiece you will never forget. As with any pizza, it has a crust, sauce, cheese, and toppings. This particular recipe will provide ingredients and instructions for gluten-free crusts, because the author of the recipe cannot eat any other kind. The primary toppings of this pizza are fresh baby spinach leaves, slivered or sliced almonds, and bacon because that’s what God intended those ingredients for is to be combined on a pizza.
This recipe is made in a 14” non-stick deep-dish pizza pan. If your pan is smaller, you might consider cutting the recipe. If your pan is larger, how do you fit it into your kitchen cabinets?
This should provide you with about fourteen servings, and by servings, I mean the full dinner meal, unless you are a teenager or a glutton. Just look at those ingredients and divide by fourteen. One slice is a big meal.
Crust
Alternative 1
Ingredients
½ stick butter
4 cups chicken broth
4 cups water
3 cups coarsely crushed blue corn chips
½ cup grits (Hominy, corn, blue corn, other, or a combination)
Italian herbs
Instructions
Sprinkle a bit of the Italian herbs across the pan. If you do not have a non-stick pan, you might want to oil it up first, and then sprinkle.
In a large pot, heat the butter on low until it melts. Add water and chicken broth and bring to a boil. (If water doesn’t boil on your burners on low, you might consider adjusting the heat.) Slowly stir in corn chips and grits. Add a teaspoon of Italian herbs. Cook down slowly stirring about every three minutes and keeping mostly covered until the mixture is thick and sticky. When you pour it into the pan, you should be able to shape it so that it has sides to hold in the pizza ingredients. It might well take half an hour to 45 minutes to cook it down.
When it is thick and sticky, pour it into the pan and spread it outward and up the sides with a spoon to try to give at least minimal sides around the edge of the pizza.
Stick the pan in the refrigerator to help the crust congeal even more.
Notes
This is the crust that I actually used for this pizza. Why am I using crushed corn chips? Because one gets all of these pieces down in the bottom of the bag, and rather than trying to eat them that way, I just crush them further and collect them together as I go through bags of corn chips. After some number of bags, I have plenty of corn chip meal.
Why do I eat so many corn chips? It’s the only grain I can eat without allergic or celiac issues. And a guy can only eat so many prunes for his fiber.
The grits help the crust set better than the corn chips alone.
Corn is not a strong grain, since it has no gluten, so it will not be easy to make sides, and they will want to fall down. That is alright if they slump, but if they fall as fast as you attempt to put them up there, you have not cooked it down enough.
Alternative 2
Ingredients
1 stick butter
4 cups chicken broth
4 cups water
2 cups grits (Hominy, corn, blue corn, other, or a combination)
1 t salt
Italian herbs
Instructions
Sprinkle a bit of the Italian herbs across the pan. If you do not have a non-stick pan, you might want to oil it up first, and then sprinkle.
In a large pot, heat the butter on low until it melts. Add water and chicken broth and bring to a boil. (If water doesn’t boil on your burners on low, you might consider adjusting the heat.) Slowly stir in grits and salt. Add a teaspoon of Italian herbs. Cook down slowly stirring about every three minutes and keeping mostly covered until the mixture is thick and sticky. When you pour it into the pan, you should be able to shape it so that it has sides to hold in the pizza ingredients. It usually takes between 18 minutes to half an hour to cook it down.
When it is thick and sticky, pour it into the pan and spread it outward and up the sides with a spoon to try to give at least minimal sides around the edge of the pizza.
Stick the pan in the refrigerator to help the crust congeal even more.
Notes
Why does this use more butter than alternative 1? Because corn chips are fried in oil and have high fat content already. Same with the salt. You don’t need to add salt to corn chips that come presalted.
Corn is not a strong grain, since it has no gluten, so it will not be easy to make sides, and they will want to fall down. That is alright if they slump, but if they fall as fast as you attempt to put them up there, you have not cooked it down enough.
This crust is basically a form of polenta.
Alternative 3
Make any deep-dish pizza crust using your favorite recipe, even if it is not gluten-free and isn’t made with chicken broth, although, you’ll be missing out on one of the best parts of the overall taste combination.
Sauce
Ingredients
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1 T butter
1-¼ cup shredded Parmesan cheese
1 cup water
Bacon grease (¼ cup? See Notes.)
1 cup slivered almonds
Instructions
Put all ingredients into blender and blend, baby, blend, until the mixture is liquefied. There might be small pieces of almonds still in it, and that is alright, but there should not be whole slivered almonds or large shreds of cheese left. The sauce also should be somewhat thick, almost like frosting for a cake.
Notes
If you use grated Parmesan, you will need to use slightly less, since grated gives less air space than shredded, but about five ounces.
How much bacon grease? I didn’t measure. I just poured the grease from baking the bacon in the toppings section into the blender.
Yeah, yeah, it’s not really Alfredo sauce, which is butter and Parmesan, but how long of a title do you want for this thing?
Toppings
Ingredients
1 bag baby spinach leaves (See notes.)
6 slices cooked thick-cut bacon (about 8 ounces)
1 cup slivered almonds
Shredded cheeses (Swiss, Monterrey Jack, Mozzarella) See notes.
Instructions
Make the crust first, as above.
Cook the bacon. I tend to bake it at 400º F for about twenty minutes. You may prefer frying. Reserve the grease for making the sauce, as mentioned above.
Make the sauce, as detailed above.
After cooking the bacon and making the sauce, the crust should have had enough time to fully congeal in the refrigerator. So, pull the crust and pan out of the fridge and put it wherever you’re going to build this masterpiece.
Wash the spinach leaves. Pat them dry.
Add the toppings to the pizza. Crumble two slices of bacon and put them on the crust. Put down about half the spinach. Sprinkle on about half the almonds. Layer on three or four cups of grated cheese. Repeat with another layer of bacon, spinach, almonds, and cheese. Crumble on last two slices of bacon. You may consider patting it all down in place, especially if it is trying to escape your deep-dish pizza pan. Spread sauce over the pizza.
Bake at 350º F for twenty minutes.
Pull it out of oven. Spread about four cups of grated cheese on the top. (See notes.)
Bake at 300º F for twenty-five minutes.
Notes
How big a bag of baby spinach leaves? I have no idea. It might have weighed eight ounces. It was about ten inches high, eight inches wide, and two or three inches thick. I just used the whole bag.
How much of what sort of cheese should you use? As you can add up, the sauce uses about 1-¼ cup Parmesan and the rest is about ten to twelve cups in total. Because this pizza is a bit more delicate in flavor than some, I used Swiss, Monterrey Jack, and Mozzarella cheeses. They all have more delicate taste to allow the other flavors, such as spinach, bacon, and almond to come through.
Why cook it, pull it out, add more cheese, and continue cooking? My experience is that the spinach reduces significantly in volume as it is cooked. If you try putting on the last cheese before putting it in to bake for awhile, your pan is probably not big enough. But, if you bake it for awhile first, the extra cheese fits just fine. Besides which, the sauce may start to brown a bit, giving a sort of top crust. When you then add more cheese on top, you get a layered top crust that is browned. This is good.
You might want to consider some sort of cookie sheet-like pan under the pizza pan to catch any overflow if you have stacked the pizza a bit too high.
Other General Notes
Cutting: I generally cut the pizza into sixteen parts by using four slices in each direction. This gives twelve slices of roughly equal size (3-½” x 3-½”), plus four “corner” pieces that are about half the size of the others. If you can manage to cut it into fourteen wedge-sliced pieces, good on ya, but remember that the gluten-free crust is not very strong structurally. It will not hold the slice together very well for picking up and eating as wedge slices are usually eaten. Any way you slice it, this is a knife-and-fork pizza.
Reheating: If there are leftovers, I usually take a slice and put it into an oven-safe baking dish and cook it at 300º F for 36 minutes. This can be done with a toaster oven for one slice, or a full oven for multiple, each in their own baking dish.
Complaints or Comments: If you’re a food wussy who thinks pizza can only be made one way and with a limited number of ingredients that do not include spinach or almonds, pound sand, girl scout. If you have other comments or questions, I would be happy to address them below.
Published in General
For those who want to live forever……
or as Dan Daley said at Bellieu Woods “Come on ya sons of bitches, ya want to live forever?”
Or, if one doesn’t want SGT. Daley to sound like George C. Scott in “Patton”: “For Christ’s sake, men – Come on!…Don’t you want to live forever?!”
It’s one day of cooking for seven meals for a couple. Just pull out a couple of slices and reheat. Potato soups or bean soups, I’m often chopping and cutting vegetables for hours, and that means every day to keep it going. Pizzas are relatively easy. Three hours total of work and maybe $3 per meal for a week? (Yes, I use expensive cheeses and bacon, but had two-thirds of the bacon left over for lunches and quite a bit of the cheese, too.) That’s why I like pizza, Kent. Most value per working hour and ingredients.
My meatloaf is pretty good for that, too, although it’s about another hour preparation time. It’s a bit less expensive, though.
Chili? Like the soups, there can be a lot of prep time and cooking time to do it right.
Ham steaks and spaghetti squash and/or broccoli or broccoli casserole with a side of polenta? That’s a lot of work, usually with no leftovers and about two servings per package, so have to plan other dinners for the week as well.
Beef steaks? Same as the ham steaks. It’s not like one can cook them for a week’s worth and heat it up later.
Pot roast? It’s a long cooking time again.
With pizza, there are so many combinations and variations. I have four or five varieties of crusts that I make with each type, either corn chips or pure grits. I have red pizza sauce, pesto sauce, and this modified Alfredo sauce. I could also do one with barbecue sauce. Then there are combinations of ingredients up the hinky-marinky. If we have pizza every fourth week, we can have thirteen unique pizzas per year easily. We could probably go four or five years and never have the same pizza. So, value, prep time, variety. What’s not to like?
Oh, man, does that ever look good. You can’t get that kind of crust with corn.
Without going to far afield, I’m reminded of a time that a friend of mine and I went to a Mellow Mushroom Pizza parlor. The server told us when we were seated “If you are really into the taste of ketchup spread over cardboard, topped with cheese then I’d like to suggest our gluten free cheese pizza”. We both ordered supreme’s.
Ari,
What’s all this about keeping the Glutens out of everything? The Glutens have just as much right to be here as the rest of us!! ….. huh … Glutens are what …
Never mind.
Regards,
Jim
That looks like what I imagine heaven to be so maybe it is living forever.
Yeah. Gluten-free has come a long way, but still not as good as a crust made from wheat flour. My corn-based crusts taste great, but they aren’t strong enough to hold up a wedge. I have been known to make a corn and cheese or pure cheese crust for thin-crust, but they naturally tend to be a bit greasy.
Man, I’ve never known anyone who has given so much deep thought about pizzas and their preparation.
You’ve got me thinking, though. I’ve got a dental appointment in a couple of hours, and I think I’ll pick up a Pizza Hut stuffed pizza on the way back home.
Uh oh, I may have said the wrong thing when I said Pizza Hut. The Hut may not be cool with people like you. I suspect you’re like those teenagers who roll their eyes when you appreciate the wrong indie band.
Don’t judge, Arahant.
I would go there if they had things I could eat. Enjoy it.
Arahant — I am so thrilled this is on the Main Feed so that I can share it with my friends who are not Members. (My stomach is rumbling and pleading with me to make it now as I type because I just read your recipe again.)
Good. Good. Let the hunger well up within you!
This is all part of your master plan, is it?
Of course.
Pizza Hut! Kent, that just sounds so unhip.
<span class="atwho-inserted" contenteditable="false" data-atwho-at-query="@arahant“>@arahant
My son is full blown paleo for his diet, his fiancé is gluten free; they’re made for each other. I’ll bookmark the post and show it to him when he gets home in Sept. Maybe the two of you can start a Paleo/Gluten free group or something.
Are you trying to give him ideas?
If you don’t have to, don’t. For some of us, it’s between gluten-free or terrible health consequences. I think it’s about 2% of the population that has one of two diseases that means no gluten. It has been shown that gluten-free diets cause health problems. For that 2%, those health problems are minor compared to what gluten causes. The other 98% of the people should be getting their grains, including wheat, barley, etc. So, again, if you do not have to go gluten-free due to a medical condition, do not do it. Have some extra gluten for me.
If you want to argue that this is not True Neapolitan Pizza, fine. First, you have probably never had pizza if one only counts True Neapolitan Pizza. Most people have never eaten it. True Neapolitan Pizza uses special tomatoes grown in the volcanic soil around Naples and mozzarella made from buffalo milk. It also may have fresh basil. So, if that is your definition of pizza, fine. But if you think pizza should have tomato sauce and sausage or pepperoni, then it throws opens the definition and possible toppings and sauces.
Even just going to the Wikipedia page on Pizza, the illustration under “Italy” is a spinach pizza from Turin. You know Turin, don’t you? It’s a city in Italy.
As for Brussels sprouts, I could make a pizza with Brussels sprouts that most people would enjoy if they were blindfolded and didn’t know what they were eating. Your prejudices are stopping you from fully enjoying life.
Chillax amigo mio. You’re going to blow a gasket if you keep this up. (For any millennials out there: That means, um, er, you see a gasket is a um, er, what I am trying to say is that people – as in human beings – don’t really have gaskets but like, um you know… So to ‘blow a gasket’ is something that used to happen to people before we all had smart phones. Well it didn’t really ‘happen’ to people because… You see it is/ was just an expression. Oh just — never mind.)
P.S. Everybody knows there is only 1 true Pizza: The Margherita.
Love,
ST
Yep, that is a version of the True Neapolitan Pizza. If one wishes to restrict the definition, that is how far one must go. Once one has opened up from that, one has opened oneself to pineapple and spinach and other wonders of fine cuisine.
Dude, I’m so chill, my temperature has to be measured in Kelvin to stay positive.
cerebral humor? Hello Mrs. Arahant. Hope you enjoyed the glutes free pizza.
My wife enjoys it just fine.
Ari,
Damn it, Ari, first you exclude the Glutens (what have they ever done to you) now you show intolerance to people from Brussels. Is there no end to your fascist tendencies. You are Hitler!!!! …what’s that…he said Brussel Sprouts…well…that’s different.
Never mind.
Regards,
Jim
What have they done to me?
Is that enough for you? I could go on.
No, that was @justmeinaz.
Ari,
Well then, never mind. Gosh, that pizza looks good. I think I can smell it from here.
Regards,
Jim
@Arahant is not obsessed with pizza. He is obsessed with creating quiche like abominations in a circular shape and trying to convince patriotic Americans that they are pizzas. In other words, he is probably a commie. SAD!!!!
It sounds totally delish. And since I can’t have gluten, there’s that.
But some questions. How often do you have it?
And if more than once a month, how do you avoid weighing over 300 pounds?