Healthy Pizza
Guilt-Free Pizza
By Joe Wilkes
From the Million Dollar Body Club - Join Today and Workout to
Win!
 When the
moon hits your eye
Like a big pizza pie
That's amore!
When you eat that whole pie
It
goes straight to your thighs
That's obesity!
Pizza. Delicious, hot, and cheesy. It
tastes good hot. It tastes good cold. It can be used effectively to treat both
depression AND hangovers! It feeds a family of four in 30 minutes or less with
no dishes! Now that's a miracle food. But there's a catch. It has tons of
calories and is chock-full of bad carbs and fats. Oh, why must the nutrition
gods be so cruel?
Even if you possess the incredible
self-control required to stop after eating one slice of pepperoni, you're still
getting about 300 calories, half of which are from fat; and half the fat
calories are saturated fat—the bad kind. After all, when there's enough
grease in your meal to soak through a cardboard box, it's a good sign you might
not have made the healthiest choice. Also, most of your carbs are coming from
the white-flour crust, which will give you plenty of empty calories but very
little fiber. And these nutritional facts apply to almost every commercially
available pizza out there. You pretty much have a better chance of seeing Mel
Gibson at synagogue than having a healthy pizza delivered to your house.
But, don't give up, pizza lovers. By
making your own pizza, you can make smarter choices for almost all of the
ingredients, and you can have your pie and eat it, too.
The Crust
 One of the things that really jacks up the calories in pizza
is the crust. It's typically made from refined white flour, a simple
carbohydrate your body metabolizes quickly into sugar and then into stored fat,
while providing very little fiber. Basically, it just provides a porous matrix
for all the greasy drippings from the toppings. But if you make your own dough,
you can substitute fiber-rich whole wheat flour for white in your favorite
dough recipe, or you can check your local health-food supermarket for a mix or
frozen whole wheat dough. As with all bread products, remember to look for
WHOLE wheat flour. If the ingredient list only says "wheat flour," it's no
different than white flour; they've just usually added a little molasses to
give it that healthy brown look. The other advantage of making your own dough
is you can roll the crust much thinner. Just thick enough to hold the
toppingsit doesn't have to be the inch-thick oil sponge that Pizza Hut calls a
pan pizza.
If you don't feel the need to knead,
you could look to other whole wheat bread products that are already cooked.
Check out Turbo Jam® creator Chalene Johnson's Pita Pizza
recipe, for example. English muffins, tortillas, lavash bread, even plain old
whole wheat toast can make a great base for your creation. Just watch your
cooking time. Premade bread products will obviously require much less time to
cook than raw dough and much less time to burn.
The Sauce
 Sauce is just tomatoes, right? How bad could that be? They've
got lycopene, a great antioxidant. The problem with most delivery pizzas is
that the sauces are likely to contain a fair amount of tremendously unhealthy
high-fructose corn syrup (as will the crust and any toppings the fast-food
conglomerates can manage to inject HFCS into). So make your own sauce. Just
dump a couple of cans of crushed tomatoes into a saucepan, add some oregano,
basil, garlic, onions, or any other spices you like, and cook it down to a
thick consistency. Or, use a store-bought marinara or pizza sauce. Just check
the ingredient label to make sure you're getting tomatoes, not corn syrup.
The Cheese
 When I was a teenager, I visited Italy, and was gravely
disappointed when I had my first slice of real Italian pizza. The bread was
great, but there was just a smear of tomato sauce and only a light sprinkling
of cheese. Nothing like the greasy delights of New York and Chicago. Since
then, my palate has matured to appreciate the flavors of the noncheese
ingredients. America, in its never-ending pursuit of obesity, has found very
few foreign dishes that couldn't be improved by melting a pound of cheese on
them. (It's even stuffed in the crust now.) It may be time to rethink the model
of pizza as cheese delivery system. A little cheese is OK for flavor, but
there's no need to smother it. If you can't see the tomato sauce, you're using
too much cheese.
There are plenty of nonfat and low-fat
cheeses on the market, as well as some cheese substitutes. You'll have to
experiment to see which ones melt well and don't taste like plastic. Or, you
could have some of the real thing if you can train yourself to enjoy the taste
of a little cheese, instead of a pound. Just sprinkle enough on for flavor. A
good guideline should be a shred of cheese per bite. Also, try some
alternatives to mozzarella and provolone, like a little blue cheese or goat
cheese. A little bit of a strong-tasting cheese can give your pizza more flavor
than a lot of a milder one.
The Toppings
 This is where the rubber meets the road nutritionally. No
surprise, the best toppings are vegetables. Onions, peppers, mushrooms,
artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, fresh herbs, fresh garlic, eggplant,
zucchini, spinachthis is a great way to load up on all the healthy
fiber-and-vitamin-rich veggies you should be eating every day. For carnivores,
try some chopped chicken breast, lean ham, or low-fat turkey, chicken, or soy
sausage. Anchovies are a great source of omega-3 fatty acids, and taste great.
Watch the sodium levels, though. Some gourmet stores offer meatier anchovies
that aren't as salty.
Be creative and think outside of the
pizza box for topping combinations. Seafood lovers, try a pizza with salmon,
goat cheese, and fresh dill. The popular Hawaiian pizza with lean ham and
pineapple is a good choice, if you stay light on the cheese. A vegetarian
friend of mine made me a pizza with veggie sausage and chopped fennel bulb that
was so good, I forgot there wasn't meat in it. Instead of ordering Domino's
Buffalo-style calorie bomb, try substituting hot sauce for marinara sauce, with
some chopped chicken breast. Make a Mexican pizza, substituting nonfat refried
beans for the sauce, and using ground turkey, salsa, and avocado for toppings.
Use your imagination, and you'll be serving gourmet pizza instead of diet
pizza. |
