BEETZA > pizza

Remember the last time you tried to make a nice tasty pizza, but your homegrown tomatoes were wiped out by midnight scavengers, and those pesky tomatoes in the store were just too expensive to make a sauce out of, and canned sauce was all sold out in every store in town, and you had just used your last jar of homemade sauce last night on a mediocre pasta dish, and you were facing a pizza apocalypse?

Solution: Beta vulgaris. Beetroot, table beet, garden beet, etc. Take them out of your root cellar where they have been happily hanging out, laughing at other vegetables who rot more quickly and making pun jokes like "hey tomato, when it comes to shelf life, nothing beets us!", or "hey DJ, drop those beets!". Beets make a wonderful savory neon purple sauce, and the creaminess of the boiled root adds a pleasant texture to your beetza. The best thing to happen to beets since sliced beets, or at least since my fellow Prussians invented the sugar beet in 1747.

The method:
Start your favorite pizza dough recipe. Select a bunch of beets, I prefer the dark red Bulls Blood but I am sure golden beets would make an equally vibrant sauce. Peel the beets if they are bitter, or leave the skins on, cube them, and boil until you can easily stab them with a fork. Transfer the beets and a little bit of the beet water into a blender/food processor, and blend until smooth. Now you will have a dark red beet puree. Stir in some tahini, enough to satisfy your sesame craving but not too much that you crowd out the beets. Tamari/soy sauce/Braggs is also good to add in a smaller amount to give it a little salt base. A few pinches of thyme mixes well with the earth taste of the beets, and really, nobody ever has enough thyme for anything (zing!). Now it is ready to step in for tomato sauce and save the world. It may look something like this:




We topped it off with some kalamata olives, green peppers, mozzarella cheese, sun dried tomatoes, red onions, fresh basil, and sliced tomatoes. Other good top additives would be blue cheese, caramelized onion, chopped kale, roasted garlic and anything you want.



If you were to place a crotch near a baked beetza, this is what you may expect it to look like, and if you were to then enjoy a beetza on a second floor porch, it may resemble what you see here, but obviously results may vary depending on crotch and porch.