The Pizza Experiment

I haven't had pizza since my doctor put me on the low sodium diet. In fact, pizza (along with restaurant soups) was one of the foods he specifically warned me about that tend to have very high sodium content. The only way for me to eat a pizza and stay within the 2000mg daily limit would be to make my own. I really miss pizza so this weekend we decided to try making it at home.

I started by making a batch of pizza dough in the bread machine. We didn't have the nerve to try any of the zero sodium recipes (my experience with cutting the salt in bread recipes has been negative), but since we'd be splitting this batch of dough into multiple pizzas I figured it wouldn't be too bad to keep the salt. It was a pretty basic recipe - just water, oil, sugar, salt, flour and yeast. Maybe I will be braver next time and try one of the salt-less versions now that I have something to compare them to.

Last night's creation was Thai Chicken Pizza - loosely based on this recipe from Trader Joe's website. We used the TJ's peanut satay sauce (a major source of the sodium, so next time we might attempt make our own), but cooked our own chicken without any salt in sesame oil with a little black pepper, added caramelized onions to the toppings, used our own dough, and reduced the amount of mozzarella cheese (and used fresh mozzarella rather than the higher sodium pre-shredded kind).

One generous and very filling serving (about 1/4 of the pizza) clocked in at 999mg, so it wasn't exactly a LOW sodium meal (but definitely didn't put me over the limit due to my very low sodium breakfast and lunch). Comparing this to the sodium content of some other Thai chicken pizza recipes from an internet search, it is definitely a big improvement. And I think we could easily lower the sodium by 30-40% with some minor modifications. The satay sauce was the major contributor, so making our own would be worth the effort. We could substitute a bit of swiss cheese in place of some of the mozzarella. We could also try the no-salt dough recipes, or split the regular dough recipe into three batches and have a thinner crust.

We're using the other half of the pizza dough tonight for a more traditional Italian style pizza. It is also probably going to come in around 1000mg per serving. On this one, we're using spicy Italian sausage from TJs (it isn't "low sodium" but had far less sodium per link than any other sausage we've found). We can probably find ways to reduce the sodium on this one as well, but again - 1000mg at dinner isn't going to get me anywhere near my 2000mg limit today. At least we've got a starting point that isn't too terribly sodium loaded, and now our challenge will be to reduce the sodium without sacrificing the flavor.