Chicken pizza crust makes for one tasteless combination
The Washington Post
A pizza crust is merely a template. It can be made of flour, or quinoa, or cauliflower, or ramen, or even, in a particular moment of madness that gripped America in 2015, hot dogs. And if you travel in certain circles, like those who follow a gluten-free or ketogenic diet, you may have noticed another innovation in pizza crust: chicken.
It’s not a chicken breast pounded out and topped with pizza toppings, like a stoner version of chicken Parmesan; that would probably be delicious. Instead, recipes start with canned chicken, shredded Parmesan cheese and an egg. Mix it all together, roll it out and bake it, and you have a pizza crust. If that’s too much work, the Real Good Food Co. has made it easier: It sells miniature frozen pizzas made with this chicken “dough,” as well as microwaveable enchiladas, which substitute chicken and Parmesan for the tortilla. The box crows about “real pizza you feel good about eating,” and proudly displays labels declaring it grain-free and gluten-free, with only 4 grams of carbohydrates per serving and 25 grams of protein. If you’re avoiding nitrates, the pepperoni is uncured. It sounds good, in theory, especially if you can’t eat gluten but you’re sick of the cardboardy gluten-free pizzas in the freezer aisle.
But in practice, this is what a chicken pizza crust is like: Think about the inside of a chicken nugget – the spongy, beige part that could have come from one or 100 chickens. Roll it out to pizza size. Think about what it would be like without the crispy, salty, fried part of the chicken nugget, and that’s what a chicken pizza crust is like. It’s a slightly rubbery disc of meat with pizza toppings, or stuffed with Mexican red sauce and ground beef.
Also, the large pizzas are 8.7 ounces, with a diameter around six inches, the perfect size for one person’s lunch. But, surprise! One large pizza is actually two servings, and one serving is 45 percent of your daily value for saturated fat. Eat one whole pepperoni pizza, as one person reasonably would, and you’ll be getting 90 percent of your saturated fat, 50 percent of your cholesterol and 76 percent of your sodium for the day. But hey, still only a few grams of carbs!
We’ll keep our chicken on top of the pizza, thank you very much.