The past couple of Brave New Meal recipes have been pretty laid back and relaxing. But the recipes that are coming up are definitely going to get more intensive. This is Beeteroni Pizza and there were many different components, each with their own recipes.

So it is a vegan pizza with beet “pepperoni” on top. But aside from just the beeteroni, there’s the dough, the cheese sauce, the tomato sauce and also a “parm” topping. All those components are supposed to be made from scratch but I took a few shortcuts because I knew I would be a little short on time.

First of all, instead of making the pizza dough, I used store bought dough that I just had to roll out. I also used my favourite jarred marinara sauce. The other change was fully omitting the parm topping because I didn’t think it was necessary to have.

Now let’s get to the things I actually did!! So I had leftover cashew cheese sauce from the Pear, Tempeh and Arugula Sandwich, and it was the perfect amount for these pizzas. I already knew it tasted good but I was excited to see how it would work on a pizza.

I also obviously made the beets which are key here. The beets take a bit of prep but I was very intrigued to see if it would actually come out to be anything resembling pepperoni. So it starts by making a marinade with broth, red wine, soy sauce, garlic and a bunch of spices including a lot of smoked paprika. The sliced beets marinated in that overnight and then I baked them off the next morning when I was getting ready to bake the pizza (yes, I made this pizza for breakfast). They turned out pretty delicious, they have a nice smoky flavour and they get a little chewy too. Did they taste like pepperoni? No – but that’s okay.

The assembly of this pizza is just the dough rolled out, then tomato sauce followed by cheese sauce and then decorated with the beets. Mine baked for about 13 minutes because my crust was a little thicker and it turned out really lovely.

Everything tasted really good together and the cashew cheese sauce was so gooey. Like I said before, the beets were really tasty but they were not like pepperoni so if you are hoping for an identical meat substitute, this is not it. I really enjoyed them though!

This is just a fun recipe. If you’re looking to expand your pizza repertoire, maybe try this vegan recipe out!