Pizza & PJ's

 After a long week of teaching, grading 125 essays, conferencing with students, taking the Volvo to the shop, spending a couple of hundred dollars to fix the Volvo, and dealing with a bunch of other crap, FD and I really needed a pizza and pj night-in.

Clearly, Bleu agreed.

Before our gluten-free days, we used to make killer pizzas on a homemade dough. But, presently, I've been disappointed with almost every pizza baking kit I've come across, and I just don't feel like working with several GF flours that don't rise and never seem to work out. We've started to relying heavily on frozen GF doughs, especially O'Doughs.

This Friday night our pizza journey began when we realized we only had one O'Dough's crust left. I ran to Walt Churchill's in Perrysburg to pick up another box or two, but they were sold out.

I considered making a GF pizza crust from scratch, but quite honestly, I wasn't in the mood for cooking, let alone experimenting with a new recipe.

So we had a GF frozen pizza crust competition between O'Dough's and Udi's, which we found deep in the deep freezer.

Udi's

Same ingredients. Two different crusts. Who would win?

Rather than following the Udi's baking instructions, we warmed up the crust for 5 minutes at 400. Then we put the toppings on and baked it for an additional eight minutes. Udi's crusts are easy to burn, so we watched it closely, especially because our oven is from hell. Literally, it runs 100 degrees hot. (Dear God, thank you for oven thermometers and please help our landlady find a new oven.)

The Udi's crust, while pipping hot, tasted like cardboard. But after letting it sit for a couple of minutes, it mellowed out and tasted like a crunchy cracker. And I am particularly proud of how beautiful the photograph the Udi's pizza turned out. (With my camera's user's manual, I'm teaching myself about photography and my camera.)

O'Doughs

The O'Doughs turned out wonderful as always. But strangely, Dan and I like the Udi's better. Its thin, crunchy crust was really flavorful. Whereas the O'Doughs had that GF-baked-good-after-taste in comparison.

I know I should be homemaking crusts, but really I need a break. And pizza is supposed to be a break from cooking, at least in my opinion. Maybe one of these days I'll make GF pizza dough from scratch. Until then, Udi's and O'Doughs are treating us just fine.