Quinoa Pizza Dough Update

In an earlier post, I gave the formula for quinoa pizza dough. While tasty, this dough was not easy to work with; none of the batches that I had made had the necessary stretch to allow me to form a pizza with a thin enough crust. So, the crust was tasty but the crust was just too thick for each slice (and I couldn’t make a pizza large enough in diameter to accommodate all of the toppings I prepared—so the pizza tended to grow upwards, like a skyscraper).

I suspected that the lack of “stretchiness” was due to the lower gluten content of the dough, since quinoa is apparently a gluten free product. A couple of weeks ago when we had pizza night, I added about 1 tablespoon of Vital Wheat Gluten to the flour mixture before adding the oil and water. This made a world of difference in the ease of working with the crust, and also vastly improved the texture of the finished product (it had a much more satisfying bite). It does not adulterate the flavor at all, but instead only improves these other attributes. I purchased a small box of it at WFM, which had instructions for inclusion in baked goods (based on the amount of flour you’re starting with). So, if anyone is actually reading this and is interested in preparing the quinoa pizza dough (in the “I’m Unemployed; Let’s Have Pizza” entry), try adding some Vital Wheat Gluten when you combine the flours in the food processor.