Zucchini Chia Pizza Crust

A HUGE improvement on veggie based pizza crust that uses chia seeds to absorb the water from the vegetable. Much stronger than your typical veggie crust, this zucchini chia crust is delicious and crunchy and the perfect base for whatever pizza toppings you desire.

Last week I made a chia pizza crust, based off of this recipe for chia buckwheat pizza crust … I really liked it and intended to blog about it, but the weather was crap so I didn’t really get any good pictures. (I might yet blog about it, once I remake it … we’ll see.)

But after making that crust and watching how the chia seeds made the extra moisture disappear, my mind got to thinking: what if, in place of the water in the recipe, I used a vegetable that’s full of water. I’ve made pizza crusts using veggies in the past and the problem with them, the thing that makes it difficult to achieve perfection is the veggies are TOO wet! You have to squeeze all the water out of the vegetable before you can make a good crust.

Well, chia seeds absorb moisture, so what if we combined the veggies with the chia seeds? Wouldn’t that create the perfect veggie pizza crust?

It seemed so obvious to me that this would work beautifully … so I went searching the interwebs for a recipe. I found nothing. Nada. Not a peep. Oh yes, there are lots of chia seed pizza crust recipes … and lots of zucchini pizza crust recipes and one that used the two together, but totally missed the point and did the squeezing out the water thing … they didn’t take advantage of the water-absorbing feature of the chia seeds.

Well, then, I was on my own for this one. With firm determination, I looked up my zucchini crust recipe and stirred together a mix of ingredients I thought would work. I knew there was no need for an egg because chia seeds are often used to replace eggs in recipes, so this further simplified my list of ingredients.

When I first mixed it up, I wasn’t sure it would work. The “dough” wasn’t coming together like I thought it should. Have patience, I told myself, the chia seeds need time to absorb the liquid from the zucchini … so I covered the dough, left it on the counter and went to the grocery store to do my shopping.

When I got back, my daughter was done with work, so I had to quickly put things away and rush over to pick her up. My son came along because we were going to do our Costco run while we were out. And he wanted to go out to eat. I didn’t really want to go out to eat. I wanted to eat my zucchini chia pizza! But I relented … as I often do with the kids. It’s kind of really awesome when your young adult kids want to hang out with their mom.

So I ended up putting my dough in the fridge until this morning. And yay, it was sticking together nicely! I was super excited to bake it up into a breakfast pizza. I divided the dough into two to make 2 individual pizzas, got out a couple pieces of parchment paper and patted out the crust.

Then I baked the crusts until they were golden brown, like this:

And while the crusts were baking, I prepped my toppings. For my breakfast pizza, I used bacon ranch dressing as the sauce, then topped with mushrooms, onions, scrambled egg, cheese, bacon and tomato. I baked it up until the cheese was nice and bubbly, then sprinkled some avocado and cilantro on top. I couldn’t wait to take a bite! But first, pictures … at least the weather is finally cooperating. It’s drippy and wet, but nice and warm out! I set up my shot, took a few pics, came back in and looked at the photos, took a few more and decided it was good. FINALLY I got to EAT my pizza. It was deeelish!

The advantages of THIS pizza crust over your typical zucchini crust are:

1. No squeezing water out of the zucchini! Who likes doing that? Not me.
2. There’s a nice bit of crunch from the chia seeds.
3. The crust is much sturdier and holds together WAY better than your typical zucchini crust. It’s not quite as sturdy as a flour crust, but it was a little firm and kinda bread-like and crunchy at the edges, and not soggy in the middle either. Total win!
4. It’s super healthy: this crust is low in calories, high in fiber and protein, plus it has heart healthy fats and only 2.8 net grams of carbs.

I love how I snuck in a healthy serving of veggies before I even topped it with anything. Things like this make me uber happy.

The recipe below assumes you’re making the whole batch into one big pizza, but feel free to divide it in half if you want to make a smaller pizza just for you or for you and a friend. If you do this, you can bag up the other crust and freeze it or stick it in the fridge for the next time you hunger for a healthy, grain free, veggie crust pizza.

Zucchini Chia Pizza Crust

• Prep Time: 15 minutes
• Cook Time: 25 minutes
• Total Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
• Yield: 4 servings 1x

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Ingredients

Scale 1x2x3x

• 1 medium zucchini
• 1 clove garlic, peeled
• 3 Tablespoons almond flour
• 1/4 cup chia seeds
• 1 oz. shredded Italian cheese
• 1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
• 1/4 – 1/2 teaspoon salt

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Instructions

1. Cut the zucchini into chunks, then put in a mini food processor with the garlic and process until cut into small bits.
2. Put the zucchini into a small mixing bowl and add the rest of the ingredients. Stir until everything is well mixed. Cover the bowl with a plate or bowl cover and let rest for at least an hour or overnight… until the dough is sticking together and doesn’t feel too wet.
3. Preheat the oven to 450 F and set a pizza stone in the oven to preheat. Put the zucchini chia mixture onto a piece of parchment paper on a flat surface and use your fingers to press it into a flat circle. (If you want, you can make a little lip at the edge to hold in the sauce and toppings.) Keep gently pressing until the crust is very thin (about a centimeter or two), taking care not to leave any holes in the crust.
4. Slide the parchment paper with the crust onto the pizza stone and bake at 450 F. for about 15 minutes or until the crust is nicely browned on top.
5. Remove the crust from the oven (leaving the pizza stone in) by sliding it onto a cutting board or flat pizza pan. Top with your desired toppings, then slide back onto the hot pizza stone and bake for another 10 – 15 minutes or until the cheese is hot, bubbly and browned in a few spots. Slice and enjoy!

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Notes

RECIPE SOURCE: http://www.sumptuousspoonfuls.com/

© Copyright 2019, Sumptuous Spoonfuls. All images & content are copyright protected. Please do not use my images without prior permission. If you want to publish any of my images, please ask first. If you want to republish this recipe as your own, please re-write the recipe in your own words or link back to this post for the recipe.

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Nutrition

• Serving Size: 1/4 of a large pizza or 1/2 of a mini pizza
• Calories: 119
• Fat: 7.6 g

Nutrition facts below are for the crust only!