Missed this thread… Back to the original post there’s nothing inherently bad about pizza, and weight loss is calories in v calories out. The scales don’t care if it’s pizza or veg…
Anyway back to more recent posts, another quick and relatively low calorie option we make in our house is…
Ingredients:
100g of low or zero fat natural yogurt - Greek or “normal”, but it’s normally Greek in our house
100g of Self Raising Flour (plus extra for dusting/ rolling)
Sauce/ Passata
Toppings
Cheese
Method:
Mix/ beat them together, may need a little kneading.
Roll out as thin as you like, but thinner does crust up better
Top with sauce of your choice (more often as not we just use passata), add toppings and cheese (we usually use the grated cheddar and mozzarella we have in the fridge.
On a pizza tray in a hot oven (as hot as it will go) for about 10 minutes.
Sometimes stuff the crust for the children, and when they’ve gluten intolerant friends over, it works just as well with gluten free flour.
Another staple in our house is Wheat Tortilla Wrap “Pizza”.
There are two types of pizzas, one is great as carb load, fuelling for tomorrows big ride etc, and one is maybe the one you shouldn’t eat too often if you’re trying to lose weight.
Lets call the good pizza the performance pizza - Pizza Marinara (tomato sauce, garlic, and maybe some turkey) Its high carb and low fat - perfect! Missing some protein maybe but you can add some greek yoghurt or something on the side. Maybe even make some greek yoghurt garlic sauce to have on the pizza.
Then we have the “life is great” pizza - Any pizza with lots of cheese on.
The main issue with lots of cheese is that it’s basically just pure fat, lots of calories, and also hinders some of the carbohydrate uptake.
It’s just basic understanding of food. Cheese is amazingly good but it’s really unhealthy from a nutritional perspective, there is no way to get around that.
Cheese, mayonnaise, hollandaise, butter, etc are all tasty as hell, but if we look at it from a performance and calorie perspective, they don’t add much more than taste and usually a calorie surplus.
Example of a great pizza to have the night before a hard/long ride: tomato sauce, 30g parmesan for taste, garlic and red onion
My biggest problem with calorie dense delicious food is moderation.
If i was able to smoke only when i am drinking, I would smoke… and if i was able to stop with one beer / week, I would also drink. Knowing myself, I put hard restrictions to myself. I also don’t like being insisted or lectured about “nothing will happen with just one slice of this or a glass of red wine” I actually know, burning in average 1000 Kcal/day in exercise, 1 glass of wine will just help me greasing the gears but I will ad some nuts to it, i will ad some junk food to the end of drinking night so I prefer not doing so.
If you know yourself and able to moderate… why not:)
Nothing, and there are no bad foods. I’ve been doing my own pizzas for several years now and for convenience I use Trader Joe’s pizza dough and the macros are only as good as what you put on the pizza. The entire pizza I made yesterday was pretty light - 3 oz lite shredded mozzarella, Tb olive oil, veggies…entire calories were 770 - 26 grams fat, 110 grams carbs, 33 grams protien. Add some lean turkey meatballs on the side and a sprinkling of parm and you have a well rounded meal if you have half the pizza, which is what I usually, but no always do.
I don’t do that type of forum maintenance these days. I leave it to official TR reps like @ZackeryWeimer.
That said, this seems to have morphed into a pizza appreciation thread on par with some of the other topics parallel to that, so I don’t know why it would need to be closed.
I just want to drop in and say I love pizza, I love eating pizza, I love being around pizza, I love all kinds of flavor of pizza.
Life exist to eat pizza, I want to eat pizza everyday. Did I mention I like pizza?
I love healthy pizza, greasy pizza, cheese-less pizza, veggie pizza… Just about all pizza minus ones with anchovies, but that’s cool if you like that because its on pizza.
Adding a couple of pics that I had posted in the Beer thread…this was a little over a month ago, the first pizza out of my new pizza oven.
The first is an EVOO base with prosciutto, grilled veggies and asiago cheese.
This one was tomato sauce, mozzarella, prosciutto and grilled chicken…maybe not quite as healthy as the first one.
Need to work on my technique in removing / rotating the pies in the oven…the gas flame does not have a shield to separate it from the pizza. I found myself having the crust hit the flame when I put the peel under it…hence some of the burn marks on the edge of the crusts.
If I ever find myself behind on food for the day on large training days, I will go to my local pizza place and eat a large margarita pizza on my own (often with a friend who’s baffled while watching me do it), it’s always the highlight of my week.
What oven do you have and what temps are you running? I have a camp chef with the pizza dome - I can get it up to 850’s but I’ve found that I enjoy cooking at around the 700-750 mark, so my pizza’s take around 2 - 2-1/2 minutes vs the 90 seconds. As for rotating, do you have a banjo peel? It’s the circular one that you slid under and rotate it around.
I also have a couple of pizza screens on hand should I need it, but normally after about a minute I’ll rotate, then after another 30 seconds I’ll have to dome the pizza to get the top cooked the way I want it.
I had a Bertello, but had a large branch from a maple tree come down on my deck over the July 4th weekend,tooke out both my Weber grill and the pizza oven (as well as the corner of the deck!).
I opted for the Stoke Pizza Oven as a replacement, mostly because the bundle came with both wood and gas options. The door to cover the front really helps get the temps up quickly, as well.
I usually cook at the +800* temps, but will try a slightly lower temp next time. I sue a wood peel to put the pizza in the oven and then the pictured metal peel to turn / remove it. Will also check into a banjo peel…thanks for the tip!
100% agree. I’d go nuts if I didn’t occasionally have food that i enjoy that isn’t the most healthy. I don’t want to gorge myself but I’m happy to enjoy pizza on occasion or a burger or whatever.
