Healthy Pizza?

Tonight I was on duty for cooking, and pizza was on the menu. I have been trying to watch my food intake in order to lose some weight, so I wondered if I could significantly reduce the joules of a homemade pizza and still have it taste good and fill me up.

I figured that the easy way to reduce the energy would be to have a very thin base and cut down on the cheese. To keep up the flavour I included some reduced fat hot salami. See the table below for its energy effect. To make it filling I used more mushroom, capsicum and onion than might normally be seen on an Italian style pizza.

Ingredients and kilojoules   Mass (grams) kJ Base 150 1120 Sauce 25 65 Mushroom 40 40 Capsicum 63 63 Ham 24 200 Mozzarella 50 650 Hot Salami 20 200 Red Onion 20 80 Total 392 2418

I made the base with flour, water, yeast, a tad of salt and sugar, milk and a little olive oil. I made enough for 3 pizzas, 150 grams for mine, and 2 lots of 300 grams for the family pizzas. With some research I totalled up 1120kJ for my 150 gram base.

I was able to roll the base out enough to almost cover my standard sized dish. Leggo’s pizza sauce was used. As can be seen from the table, of the toppings the ham and the salami were the next highest energy source after the cheese. I guess what I take from this is that a lot of vegetables can be used without significantly increasing the energy but I need to go easy with the meats. I think that 50gms of Mozzarella cheese is about as low as you can go and still call it a pizza. I was surprised that the Mozzarella had a lower energy count than the “light” tasty cheese that I was considering as an alternative.

I did not use olive oil or seasoning, figuring that there would be enough of these flavours provided by the processed meat. On removing the pizza from the oven I found it to be still reasonably “moist”, the moistness being provided by the vegetables rather than oily products that I more typically use as toppings. (Extra cheese, pepperoni, olive oil.) I found the eating to be very satisfying. There was plenty of flavour; it was reasonably filling and contained less than 600 calories. It did an excellent job as my main meal for the day.