For the second of our alternative pizza month Vines, we made a base out of cauliflower. I’m sure you’ve seen this idea elsewhere – it’s been quite widely used as an alternative way to create a pizza base, making it gluten free. I’m not a big fan of cauliflower, so I had been approaching this one with a little trepidation – was it going to taste like an actual cauliflower, or would there be subtler tastes at work?

It took a little while longer to make than I would have expected, although given that we were making our own dough, it was not unreasonable. One word of warning: don’t use your favourite tea towel. It took two washes to get the smell of cauliflower juice out of ours, and leaving it for just one day before the wash was put on left it stinking in a way that I could barely believe. I thought at first the drains had somehow got blocked until I realised where the smell was coming from.

You can of course substitute your own toppings for those we have used here. One thing I had to notice is that it calls for a lot of parmesan. Perhaps a bit too much. You can definitely taste it in the base, but it is not very strongly flavoured. We had to put in a whole pot, which seems a bit excessive given the results. I’m not sure what the alternative would be, however.

How did it taste? Pretty much like a cheesy cauliflower pizza. It wasn’t terrible – far from it. If I had to get rid of gluten from my diet, maybe I’d try this recipe more often just to get my pizza fix. But this isn’t the best base we’ve had so far during alternative pizza month – the tortillas were so much tastier. I’d rate it somewhere around a 4/10. If you actually like the taste of cauliflower, then you will love this base. It’s also a bit crumbly though, so you might want to eat with knife and fork – although I did manage to pick up the slices by hand, it was a close thing.

Here’s the Vine, so you can see what it’s like to make!

And if you want to try it yourself, the recipe we followed: