Perfect Gluten-Free Pizza Crust Vegan Recipe

This vegan gluten-free pizza crust is deliciously chewy, bakes up nice and crispy, and will make you feel like you’ve had a “regular” pizza!

Vegan Gluten-Free Pizza Crust Can Be Delicious

Not too long ago, I was thinking (lamenting?) I might go the rest of my life and never have a good pizza crust. Every other gluten-free pizza crust I’ve tried is like a cracker. Even at pizza restaurants, the GF crusts were a fail.

Yeah, well, that’s not necessary. This pizza crust will fool you. It’s stretchy, chewy, crispy, with air pockets. OMG. I feel like I’ve eaten real pizza for the first time in years.  It has been literally over a decade since I’ve had a pizza crust this good. I used it for the Vegan Dill Pickle Pizza and it was delicious.

Gluten-free baking often uses eggs in an attempt (usually failed) to add some of that delightfully chewy texture that real bread with all the yummy glutens has in it. That makes it even more difficult to find good gluten pizza crust that’s also vegan. 

Helpful Items for a Perfect Gluten-Free Pizza Crust

Here’s a list of things I found really helpful in making this recipe! Note: Some may be affiliate links! 

• I probably wouldn’t make nearly as much bread without my Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer. <— That’s a link to one like I have. I love it and use it almost every day. I got mine many years ago when I got into regular breadmaking. When I became gluten-free I stopped using it to knead bread (it’s great for other things!). Now, I’m a bread-making fool again, just gluten-free, and the dough hook on this works great on this GF bread. Of course, kneading by hand works great, too!
• This inexpensive French rolling pin is pretty awesome. It’s so easy to use!
• Psyllium Husk Powder is the secret ingredient in this recipe and gives this crust an authentic texture!
• A bullet-type blender like this NutriBullet will help with the secret ingredient!
• Otto’s Naturals Cassava Flour is the best cassava flour I’ve used. It’s soft, finely ground, gluten-free, and can be used just like wheat flour.
• I used Fleischmann’s Instant Dry Yeast for much of my bread-making projects lately because that’s what my local store had (and then they ran out and I made GF sourdough starter, DIY coming soon!) but Bella Rise Instant Dry Yeast is a great product, too.
• A good pizza pan always comes in handy! This one is pretty inexpensive, too.
• And, last but not least, Lactic Acid works so well and makes sure your crust doesn’t turn purple!

Secret Ingredient for Perfect GF Pizza Crust

Here’s the secret ingredient that has made GF pizza crust as good as the original … 

Psyllium Husk Powder

This works like a miracle in adding the right texture to GF baked goods, especially pizza crust. It’s pretty much just fiber and works naturally to rid the body of cholesterol, especially “bad” cholesterol. 

Soluble Fiber Is Healthy!

Psyllium husk powder is super high in soluble fiber. You may have used it before and not even known it, it’s the main ingredient in fiber products like Metamucil. Soluble fiber helps digestion, but it’s also beneficial to just about every part of the body, including the pancreas and heart. 

Psyllium husk powder is heart-healthy because the fiber if contains escorts excess and bad LDL cholesterol out of the body. It binds to it and moves it on through, basically.  

How to Keep Psyllium Husk Powder from Turning Purple?

One of the drawbacks of using psyllium husk powder is that it turns just a little purple when baked. This gives a super weird and honestly unappetizing look to bread. It still tastes delicious but looks like an alien food experiment. 

The Easiest Way to Keep Psyllium Husk Powder from Turning Purple is Lactic Acid!

The easiest way to keep psyllium husk from turning your bread purple is to acidify the dough. There are a couple of ways to do that but the best is to use a bit of lactic acid. Lactic acid is usually vegan and while you can’t locate it easily at your corner store you can certainly get it at larger online shops, most notably Amazon. I used the Mezzoni Lactic Acid. It works so easily and lactic acid has the added benefit of giving a sourdough-like taste. The lemon juice method below will give the bread a more sour but citrus flavor.

Another plus to lactic acid is that it works really well in vegan cheese making as well.

Alternatively, and this is a second-choice method if you can’t get lactic acid, you can solve this problem with a bit of lemon juice. This takes just a minute or two and makes a big difference in the color of the finished product. I’m pretty sure it’s the acid in the lemon juice but am not sure. Just place the psyllium husk powder into a small cup and cover it with a tablespoon or so of lemon juice. It will sort of “bleach out” the psyllium husk powder while at the same time turning the powder and juice into a thick, fairly hard, rubbery blob. 

The rubbery chunk of bleached-out psyllium husk and lemon juice mixture must be broken down, though, so it can be added to the flours. Do this by scooping it into a bullet-type blender with about 3/4 cup of the water called for in the recipe. Blend it until it’s smooth. Now it’s going to be more like … well,  it’s thinner, let me put it that way. It’s more like a gelatinous smoothie now. But again, this is where the structure and chewy texture comes from. 

Egg-Free Gluten-Free Baking!

Often, gluten-free pizza crust recipes, or any gluten-free bread recipe for that matter, will use eggs as a way to get some of that stretchy texture. It doesn’t work very well for the texture, it smells horrible, is not vegan, and is totally unnecessary. The psyllium husk powder, along with a few other things, creates a perfectly chewy crust.

Yeast for GF Bread 

When my kids were little and we made bread together, I told them it was yeast farts that made the bread rise. #momoftheyear But that’s a basically true description of how yeast works. #facts #science

Any yeast can be used and this works great with a GF sourdough starter, too. It’s important to first “proof” most yeast to start. That means just put it in a bit of warm (not too hot!) water with a bit of sugar and see what it does. If the yeast is viable it will poof up and make clouds of yeast colonies. This only takes a few minutes. 

So basically, Metamucil and yeast farts come together here with delicious GF flours to make the best tasting, best-textured vegan gluten-free pizza crust I’ve ever had. Watch the video above to see how soft and stretchy the dough is!

Here’s the recipe.  Let me know how yours turns out!

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Try this Easy Quick Vegan Pizza Sauce!

Vegan Pizza Sauce is delicious and super easy to make with common ingredients. It’s tasty, just a little cheesy, and takes less than 10 minutes from start to finish!