There are some new players out there in the battle for pizza lovers’ hard earned dollars – Blaze Pizza and Pieology. Why is that relevant to this newsletter? Because both new players are offering gluten free pizza, and according to the Internet, they offer dairy free cheese to go onto that pizza. Dairy free cheese is a first for any pizza chain that I am aware of.
Why would anyone want something other than delicious stringy, stretchy, mozzarella cheese on his or her pizza? Unfortunately, the same immune malfunction that makes a person gluten sensitive also makes them casein sensitive, and it is the casein protein in mozzarella cheese that makes it taste so good. Casein is the main protein in all cheese and it looks almost identical to gluten to the body. Ninety-five percent of the time if you react to gluten, you will also react to dairy products.
Let’s be clear upfront. If you have a serious celiac disease condition, you should not even walk into a pizza joint of any sort. There is always cross contamination. Wheat flour dust is in the air. So unless they prepare the pizza in a separate room and cook it in a separate oven, don’t even try it. If you are gluten intolerant, due to leaky gut conditions and resultant systemic inflammation, your tolerance is slightly greater once you have achieved some degree of healing of the gut lining. You don’t want to recreate the leaky gut, so you need to avoid gluten and casein as they trigger the destruction of the gut proteins that hold the gut lining cells tightly together (zonulin and occludin). But if you are not concerned about ending up in the hospital bleeding internally from a chance encounter with a microscopic amount of gluten, then go for it. This type of person can probably tolerate the occasional gluten free pizza from a fast food provider.
Do you not know if you have a problem? It is a simple blood test to find out, but it is not yet available from standard medical labs, so you won’t be able to have your typical medical doctor order these tests. Most of the research in this area has been done by a Dr. Aristo Vojdani. He and his team have published over 200 peer reviewed research papers, and he set up Cyrex Labs in Arizona to do this very type of testing. We can order this type of blood test at the office for you. A nurse will come to your home or work to performs the blood draw.
Back to Blaze and Pieology – Ellen and I did a taste test comparison last week to see which pizza place might win our hearts for our carbohydrate splurge day each week. Our first try was Blaze Pizza in the Gold River shopping complex on Sunrise Blvd. The basic concept is a build your own pizza. You pick your crust – gluten free in our case – and they take the fresh dough and press it into a pizza round for a personal size pizza. You then choose a sauce and the type of cheese or cheeses you want. They had several types of cheese, including the dairy free variety we wanted. Then come your toppings. You get to pick what ever you want and as many as you want. They have several meats and lots of different vegetable choices. In the end your personal pizza is popped into a very hot oven for three minutes and out it comes ready to eat.
We liked the Blaze pizza, but even though they put on whatever toppings you wanted, they were rather sparse on the quantities they used. I like pepperoni and they put on like six pieces. I chose the white sauce, which was very mild and with no discernible garlic taste, and the crust was tolerable but somewhat tough. I hoped that since the crust was not some pre-made job, but freshly pressed right in front of me, that the taste and texture would have been better. Unfortunately it was not, it was only okay. As expected, there was an extra fee for the gluten free crust, which brought the cost of the pizza up from the normal $8 to a pricey $11. This is all worth it for a good pizza that tastes good and is not going to poison me.
The next weekend we checked out Pieology. Curiously these two eateries are almost across the street from each other. Pieology is a block closer to highway 50, but both places are dangerously close to the office. The layout and format at Pieology is the same as at Blaze Pizza – build your own personal pizza. We asked for gluten free pizza crust and were disappointed to see them pull out a pre-made crust from under the counter. We asked for the dairy free cheese and were told that this store did not carry any, but that their downtown store did. We opted for the goat cheese feta. Pieology had a wider selection of sauces and they were much more generous with the toppings. When I asked for pepperoni, I got 20 to 30 slices of mini pepperoni.
Honestly I would have to say that the Pieology pizza tasted better and the crust was crisper and lighter than that at Blaze Pizza. But on the other hand they get two black marks for not having the dairy free cheese. At this point it is a tossup as to which I would go back to in the future. Actually I am thinking I might take in a bag of Diaya mozzarella vegan cheese and seeing if they would use that on my pizza at Pieology. That would definitely break the tie.
Healthy living requires a fair amount of effort, and the majority of that effort is in the realm of eating healthy foods. Nothing impacts our bodies nearly as much as the fuel we put into it. No amount of super supplements can compensate for a bad diet. We must have good
healthy food. Unfortunately, these days that means learning to cook for ourselves most of the time. Unless you can afford a personal chef who is trained in healthful cooking techniques, you have to prepare most of your own food. Restaurants and fast food providers are simply not in the business of health. There are very few restaurants that provide anything resembling healthy food. The staple ingredients at even the best restaurants are sugar, grains/flours, and vegetable oils – all toxic to most people. I am constantly amazed at the strange places these substances are added to what I would have thought would be simple healthy foods.
All that said, I firmly believe that my body should be strong enough handle one pleasure based meal each week. I still avoid obvious poisons for me, like gluten, but I enjoy going to restaurants with my sweetie and friends and ordering ribs or fajitas, or even pizza. I do not want my life limited to the salad with oil and vinegar as my dinner whenever we go out. So I cook for myself using fresh, simple, natural ingredients most of the time and keep away from pretend preserved food-like substitutes for real foods. Many of my previous articles have focused on this type of eating. But today I want to communicate the importance of also having fun now and then. It is good for the soul and that also makes it good for the body.