Low-Carb Pizza

One of the challenges of low-carb dieting is figuring out how to come up with low-carb equivalents of foods that you’re used to eating.

Like pizza.

Many low-carb dieters have tried different ways of making low-carb pizza, and most of the home verisons aren’t that successful.

One of the most successful attempts was a Red Baron low-carb pizza that was marketed last year, but they stopped making it and you can’t buy it anymore. So now low-carb dieters are back to self-made efforts when it comes to pizza.

Fortunately, I’ve discovered an amazingly simple way to make low-carb pizza at home.

The result of my efforts is pictured above.

Now let me tell you how to make it.

Here in SoCal we have a pizza chain called Papa Murphy’s (NOT the same as Papa John’s). The thing about Papa Murphy’s is that they don’t cook the pizza. They make it, but then you pick it up and take it home and bake it yourself. (It is, correspondingly, cheaper than ordering from a pizza shop that makes, bakes, and delivers the pizza.)

Last year Papa Murphy’s started advertizing low-carb pizza, and I couldn’t resist stopping in to see what it was all about.

It turned out that they were putting pizza ingredients in to a "special" pan that you took home and baked in your oven. There was no crust to this pizza. Instead, you poured a few eggs (or equivalents from a store-bought "Best of the Egg" product in a carton) into the tray before baking it. This served as a binder, fluffer, and crust.

Then you cut it up and eat it.

It worked great!

I hadn’t order it for a long time, but recently I went back to Papa Murphy’s and asked if they still had it available.

At first they were confused, for they now have an ultra-thin crust "low-carb" pizza (13-14g per slice ain’t low-carb in my book, that’s more "mid-carb"), but then a more experienced employee said that they still have what I was after, only they call it a "fritatta," which the dictioanry defines as an open-faced omelette.

That’s pretty much what this is: It’s like an open-faced omlette that uses pizza ingredients and made to resemble a pizza more than an omelette. In fact, the end-result reminds me much less of an omelette than a pizza.

They can still probably make it cheaper at Papa Murphy’s than I can at home since they buy the ingredients in bulk, but it can be made at home.

I realized that there was nothing so "special" about the "special" pan that Papa Murphy’s provides, so I decided to make it myself. I went to the store and bought a couple of disposable, aluminum stuffing pans, as well as the ingredients I wanted to use. These included:

1. Ragu Pizza Sauce
2. Shredded Mozarella cheese
3. Shredded sharp cheddar cheese
4. Hormel sliced pepperoni
5. Pre-cooked bacon strips
6. Pre-cooked chicken strips
7. Sliced mushrooms
8. Sliced black olives

To make the low-carb pizza, you begin pre-heating my oven to 375 degrees (190 degrees Celsius, for international readers).

While it is heating you spread the pizza sauce across the base of the aluminum pan. (This is IMPORTANT to keep the other ingredients from sticking to the pan.)

Then you lay down a thick layer of Mozarella cheese.

Then you begin laying down the other ingredients, working in some more pizza sauce at one stage.

Finally, you top it off with some more Mozarella cheese (so that it will melt and hold together the ingredients you put on the top).

Then, when the oven is hot, you pour the egg-mixture over the result and put it in to bake.

Wait till the surface is golden brown (pictured above), which should be 20-45 minutes later–piling the ingredients thicker means longer baking time but thicker pizza. The end result can be an inch thick (2.5 cm for international readers), which is like deep dish pizza.

Let it cool for 10-15 minutes and cut the pizza into squares.

Delicious!

Enjoy!