I love pizza — but no longer eat cheese. So, in recent years, I began to think of pizza as more of a memory than a meal.
My fifth birthday was the stuff pizza dreams are made of, at least to a kid living in New York City’s Lower East Side in the early 1970s. Judy, my mom’s artsy friend who ran a day care out of her apartment on St. Mark’s Place, marched the half-dozen kids under her care down to the pizza shop on the corner, where we stood on the sidewalk watching, with utter delight, as the Pizza Man spun dough in the air while Judy ordered a large pie. Twenty minutes later, we were sitting in a circle on the floor in the darkened apartment, surrounding a steaming hot pizza festooned with candles while everyone sang “Happy Birthday.” No birthday party has really ever matched it since.
When my mother and I moved to New Haven, Conn., a year later, we landed in another city that treats its pizza with the gravity it deserves. Locals will ask whether you are a supporter of Pepe’s or Sally’s, the city’s two nearly century-old pizzerias, and judge you on the response. (My stepdad, a local, is a Pepe’s man, so you know where our family’s loyalties lie.) Years later, I married a guy from Detroit, a city with its own intense pizza tradition.
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It wasn’t until I started making pizza, first in a shop in Florida when I was 18, where I pushed out pies four nights a week for nearly a year, and later on Friday nights for my family and friends, that I really started thinking about what makes pizza good — and what makes it terrible. Both became more apparent to me when I did what might seem unthinkable to any true pizza-lover: After spending most of my life as a cheese-eating vegetarian, I transitioned to a vegan diet.
Pizza suddenly became a problem. Or so I thought.
The thing is, America is filled with really bad pizza. We kid ourselves into thinking it’s tasty because we’ve loaded it with cheese and piled on toppings from pineapples to caviar, but the fact that we’re discarding the crusts and scraping off the sauce proves a pizza is truly only as good as its parts. For instance, when folks in New Haven wax poetic about Pepe’s or Sally’s pies, it’s the charred, coal-fired crust that gets the most attention, and for good reason — that crisp base sets the tone for everything on top, filling your nose with smoky intensity with each bite. Even Detroit-style pizza, in which buttery Wisconsin brick cheese is a key ingredient, relies on a malty dough that can take days to properly ferment and a slightly sweet sauce that heightens all the rich flavors. Each component is necessary to its success.
I began wondering how I could make pizza that had the right aroma, texture and flavor, but without cheese. Even though commercial plant-based cheese has come a long way over the past few years, it sometimes doesn’t melt or brown quite the way it should, and the result can be, well, less than appealing. While I was happy with the herb-flecked pizza dough I had developed over years of practice, I knew that it wasn’t enough.
It was a pizza from chef Michael Schlow’s now-shuttered Casolare in D.C. that gave me a place to start: a thin crust smeared with a tangy tomato sauce and dotted with just a few capers and olives, each offering notes of salt and vinegar that nearly negated the need for cheese. Because I had a time-tested dough recipe already, I began working on the sauce, settling on pureeing sun-dried tomatoes packed in oil into a base of crushed tomatoes and a touch of smoked paprika, providing a deep layer of flavor against the herbaceous crust.
Still, I craved cheesiness of some kind — the fat and umami that bring richness to pizza.
A conversation years ago with vegan cheesemaker Kale Welch, co-owner of the Herbivorous Butcher in Minneapolis, got me thinking about that umami, because vegan cheese is often flavored with miso, a salty, earthy fermented paste made from beans. I had often made cheese pizza topped with caramelized onions, and it occurred to me that those onions, if cooked in miso, could become a stand-in for the cheese: soft, stretchy, oily and rich. Cook them again on top of a pizza at 500 degrees and you even get a few crispy edges, just as you might with cheese.
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It was an epiphany.
Because, let’s be honest, cheese is about fat and texture. Fat, as a flavor carrier, delivers seasonings straight to our taste buds, while texture is so important to our perception of food that we’ll instantly reject something based on how it feels in our mouths. (Consider soda, which has the same flavor whether carbonated or not.) So, once we’re armed with that knowledge, crafting pizza without cheese becomes an exercise in recognizing what part the crust, sauce and toppings can play in making a perfect pie.
After my caramelized-onion breakthrough, I decided to add to my pizza thinly sliced shiitake mushrooms that I pre-bake until they start to get crisp like bacon. And then I started considering how to create a white pizza. I quickly figured out that whipping pureed artichokes, with their meaty depth, into tofu made a satisfyingly luscious ricotta cheese that easily stands in for the dairy version.
Can a good cheese enhance a pizza? Sure — but it shouldn’t have to do all the heavy lifting. And a truly great pizza doesn’t need it at all.
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