Can Pizza Be A Health Food?

Can pizza be a health food? There are lots of yummy toppings!

When I was a kid, my family religiously had pizza and movie night on Friday evenings. It was my favorite dinner-time tradition. My mom loved it because it gave her a break from cooking and dishes. It was a treat to ride with Daddy to pick up the pizzas (he didn’t think delivery was worth the extra cost) and come home with the hot boxes on my lap.

​When Michael and I got married, I couldn’t quit having my favorite weekly meal. When finances were tight, Michael introduced me to a boxed dough mix and we started making our own. We got really creative with toppings - Michael came up with a chili dog pizza where the sauce was beanless chili and the meat was sliced hotdogs, topped with cheddar cheese. It was surprisingly delicious. Yeast dough sounded intimidating to me, but eventually, I got the courage to make it myself. I enjoyed the experience of kneading and the satisfaction of seeing the dough rising.

Yeast dough isn't as scary as I thought.

Our first child, Peter, was born with severe food allergies. That started our food journey: trying to figure out what we should be eating for Peter’s safety and for our health. By the time we had William, I had read a few nutrition books and the main theme I found was that, whatever we ate regularly, it needed to be nutrient dense.

Most pre-packaged foods are calories with no nutrition. It was so disappointing to me that our store-bought bread had so few actual vitamins in it that it had to be “enriched” with artificial vitamins to even be worth eating. We tried lots of wheat-free pizza options (cauliflower crust was what we settled on, but it wasn’t because we loved it…). No one in our family had gluten or wheat allergies, so I didn’t want to completely cut it out of our diet. Being gluten-free wouldn’t be a sustainable lifestyle for us.

I wanted healthy wheat. And, I knew that meant grinding the wheat berries (isn’t that a funny name for the whole wheat kernel?) to make fresh flour. Using freshly ground wheat berries means you can eat bread that is 100% whole wheat and it is soft and delicious – the fresh flour still has its original oils. Out of the 44 nutrients that humans get from food, freshly ground wheat contains 40 of them!

I love the biblical image of Jesus as the bread of life – that passage has so much more meaning to me, knowing that fresh bread really does sustain life. If you would like more information about how amazing freshly ground flour is, please check out this information from Sue Becker. It changed the way I look at bread forever.

Bread being kneaded in my Bosch mixer.

​It took a while for us to take the plunge to doing our own grinding. It meant buying a grinder – a good electric one cost about $250. And, I realized how hard it would be to hand knead dough for all the bread my family ate, so I wanted a powerful mixer, which was around $400. The cost was a huge investment for us. I was so nervous that I would get tired of the work involved in hand-making all these foods for my family. But, the reason I stuck with it was because of pizza. 

William helps do toppings almost every week.

We absolutely couldn’t afford to buy pizza every week, so on Friday evenings, I would mill a bunch of grain and make a pizza and two loaves of bread. I would stick extra flour in the freezer and use  it throughout the week for biscuits, muffins, pancakes, etc. Having our bread baking tied to our pizza night kept me going. Even when I was super pregnant and couldn’t lift the mixer onto the counter by myself, we managed to keep up our bread and pizza on Friday nights.

The kids wait in line for a taste of cheese.

​As our family has grown, so has our pizza consumption. I now make three large pizzas and four or five loaves of bread each week. Friday pizza night is a bit of a crazy circus because of all the little helpers who love to make pizza, too – but I’m happy to be passing on the tradition! Michael put together this fabulous video showing one night of pizza making. Do you make pizza at your house?