I know, I totally know. Vegan pizza?! How is that even possible?!!
It’s a question I asked myself a lot when I dropped dairy from my diet earlier this year. Friday night is pizza night around here – every. Friday. Night. And darn if I was going to let a little lack of cheese get in the way of that.
Except, well, what’s pizza without hot and melty cheese? Good question.
The past several months, I’ve tried a lot of dairy-free pizzas. A few were good; way more than a few were stinkers. But this vegan pizza with corn, tomatoes, and fresh basil, my friends. This cheeseless pizza recipe is a winner. And it’s so, so super easy.
In experimenting, I found that for me, a vegan pizza really needs to have three things going for it:
The first two are doable, but #3 is a little harder – without cheese or other dairy, creaminess can be hard to come by. But not with this pizza! Because, my friends, we have the sauce. And oh. The sauce.
The creamy base of this pizza – the very base that makes it so the lack of cheese doesn’t cross your mind even once – is garlicky, creamy, and corny. Corny in a good way. Not a silly way. So what’s the secret? Coconut milk! And garlic! And fresh corn right off the cob! Whip it all together and there’s your sauce. It’s seriously good stuff.
Then we top it with a few slices of onion, juicy cherry tomatoes (a tomato right off the vine, sliced thin, would be divine too), and a few extra kernels of sweet corn. Bake until golden and bubbly; inhale the garlicky scent that fills your kitchen. That last step is mandatory. Sprinkle some basil over your fresh-out-of-the-oven pie, and you’re good to go.
Who needs cheese, man?!