homemade pizza, with bechamel sauce, fresh basil, mushrooms, and grape tomatoes

This pizza is half the white pizza from 500 Vegan Recipes, half the slow-rise pizza dough on vegan yumyum and 101 cookbooks (originally from the completely amazing The Bread-Baker's Apprentice), plus a few extra percentages of my favorite pizza ingredients.

Since that dough is already beautifully detailed and illustrated in two prominent places on the internet, I won't bother repeating it here. That recipe makes 6 small pizzas. I found that making half the batch gave me the amount of dough I wanted to make a pizza for 3 people. You may find otherwise, and besides, if you make the whole batch, you can always freeze what you don't use and then you'll have delicious pizza dough on hand whenever you want.

As for the toppings, these are my favorites. I meant to add pine nuts, but I didn't remember until after I took the pizza out of the oven (we topped our slices with raw pine nuts, and it was just fine). The 500 Vegan Recipes version calls for fresh basil, sliced white onion, and smoked tofu slices as the topping. I'm sure this dough and sauce would be delicious with any veggie toppings you desire!

BECHAMEL SAUCE
1/2 cup earth balance
1/4 cup all-purpose flour 
1 cup plain soy milk
1 tsp garlic powder 
1 tsp dried basil

PIZZA
1/2 recipe slow-rise pizza dough 
1 recipe bechamel sauce (ingredients above)
20-30 fresh basil leaves, or even more if you have them! 
1/2 pound thinly sliced mushrooms
1 cup grape tomatoes, sliced in half
1/4 cup pine nuts (not pictured) 


Preheat the oven to 450 F.

To make the bechamel sauce: in a pot, melt the earth balance. Whisk in the flour until smooth, then add the soy milk and continue to whisk until the sauce thickens (about a minute or two). Remove from heat and add the herbs, and salt to taste.

Roll out the dough according to instructions on either of the slow-rise pizza dough recipes linked above.

Layer the basil leaves on top of the dough. Pour the bechamel sauce over the basil, spreading evenly. Add any other veggies or toppings you're using, in this case mushrooms, grape tomatoes, and pine nuts.

Bake for about 10 minutes, until the crust is golden.