Fake meats (think chik’n or fakin bacon) have always freaked me out.  Before I was vegetarian I could not understand why someone would rather eat substitutes than the real thing.  Since I’ve become vegetarian, all I can think is that those products are so full of gross chemicals and preservatives.  I like tofu and tempeh, and I’ve been interested in seitan, but I just can’t understand consuming lots of chemicals to eat a reproduction of a meat product.

A few weeks back I saw that Cate had made her own seitan.  She made it look both simple and tasty.  As I googled around, comparing recipes, I finally landed on this one for spicy Italian seitan.  Since I’ve always felt that the main flavor of Italian sausage was in the spices (especially fennel), I thought making a seitan version of Italian sausage might work.  Plus, I have no trouble with meat substitutes that are made in my own kitchen with recognizable ingredients.

Here’s the recipe for the spicy sausage again.  I added 1 tbsp of nutritional yeast to the dry ingredients, just because I like the taste.  I also added the wet ingredients slowly to the dry ingredients; I ended up needing only about 2/3 of the volume of wet ingredients before I reached a good consistency.  I’ll come up with my own recipe for this soon, but the one above is a great starting place.

I used my favorite pizza dough recipe and came up with my own pizza sauce recipe, inspired by this pizza sauce recipe.

Saute the onion and garlic in the olive oil until the onion is translucent.  Add all the herbs and cook for 2-3 min.  Then add just the tomato paste, and cook for an additional 2-3 min before adding the water.  Stir in the honey to taste.  (At this point I found the tomato sauce to taste concerningly sharp and bitter, but the honey solved that problem perfectly. )  Then stir in the parmesan cheese.

I let the pizza sauce cool while the pizza dough was rising. 

When the pizza dough was ready, I rolled it out and topped it with the sauce, sausage slices, and mozzarella.

I baked the pizza at 450 degrees for approximately 25 min (until the cheese was melted and the crust was golden)

I topped the pizza with red onion slices and fresh basil.

It was almost shockingly good.  I need to find a carnivore to try this sausage out on, but it seemed like a pretty good sub to us!  The sausage was surprisingly easy to make.  It only has 5 minutes of hands on time, and then an hour in the oven.  None of the kneading or simmering that I was expecting with seitan.  Definitely worth a try!

What are your favorite pizza toppings?  Sausage pizza used to be my favorite before I was vegetarian.  I was psyched to bring it back!