week 16: Buffalo Chicken/Tofu Pizza

I was very excited about this week’s pizza – the husband was not.  He’s not a big fan of buffalo wings, or blue cheese, or spicy things in general.  I, on the other hand, love blue cheese and spicy foods.  He tried to convince me to make the pizza when he was out of town earlier in the week but I told him I needed his review so I’d wait until he got home. He was thrilled to hear that.

Although I’ve been a vegetarian, or more accurately, a pescatarian for about 5 years now, I’ve never really cooked with tofu much.  I think I’ve only bought it twice before this week and that was a couple of years ago.  I like it enough and I’ll order it at Thai restaurants, I just never cook it myself.  I decided to try it tonight on the buffalo pizza to see how it would work.

I used my standard pizza crust for this pizza.  For the tofu, I first pressed it to get some of the extra moisture out.  I put the brick on a plate between paper towels and put another plate on top of it.  On top of that plate I placed two bowls, the top one filled with water.  I changed out the paper towels as they became soaked.  This probably isn’t the most earth-friendly approach.  Sorry.

After I pressed the tofu for about 10 minutes I heated some canola oil in a frying pan and added the tofu.  I cooked it for about 5 minutes on each side so it would become nice and chewy.  I then sprinkled it with some garlic powder because I like garlic.

The crust was topped with some Frank’s Red Hot Wings Sauce, shredded mozzarella cheese, and crumbled Gorgonzola cheese.

My husband cooked some chicken on the George Foreman grill and added it to his third of the pizza.  He didn’t get a half this week since he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to like it.  I was surprised he wanted a third!

I added the tofu and chicken and cooked it for about 10 minutes at 475 F.

This pizza was pretty good.  I liked the chewiness of the tofu on it.  The husband even said “it was more bearable than I expected.”  I’ll count that as a success.  He also said that the Gorgonzola and hot sauce went together well.  I was very surprised by this because he doesn’t usually like Gorgonzola.  Or hot sauce.  I also liked the Gorgonzola on this and thought it added a nice element to the pizza.  We both thought that the tofu would have been better if I had marinated it in some of the hot sauce.