What Does Cauliflower Crust Pizza Taste Like?

So I’m doing this six-week low-carb experiment, and I think I’m hating myself more than the experiment.

The best part of the whole thing is the food suggestions I get from other people. Because A) People are nice and are trying to help me and B) I need to eat more than just salads and eggs or I’m going to go crazy and crash my car into an Olive Garden in the hope that my car flips a table and a breadstick accidentally lands in my mouth and in my panic, I chew it. (Totally not my fault! I panicked! I didn’t cheat!)

About a week ago someone suggested that I try cauliflower crust pizza (thanks Shannon!) and I was like Yeah, I don’t think so. That sounds a little too desperate.

Fast forward one pizza-free week and I was like “WHERE’S THAT RECIPE?” (If you google “cauliflower pizza crust” they’re all basically the same recipe.)

So, on the same night that I made actual pizza for my husband and daughter and calzones for my son, I made cauliflower crust pizza for myself. Big mistake, because making the cauliflower crust is way more involved than making actual pizza crust. So while the rest of my family ate around 8:15, my dinner wasn’t ready until 9:30. By that point I’d pretty much lost interest and could have gone to bed without dinner, but I’d gone through all that trouble, so I sat down with a slice.

It was fine. It looked and acted like pizza. I could eat it like a slice of pizza, no knife and fork.

But it tasted exactly how I thought it was going to taste: Like sauce and cheese on top of cauliflower. It tasted like the fact that I couldn’t eat real pizza.

And I think that’s my problem with most of the suggestions that I get for low-carb foods. They’re striving to replace other foods that I adore.

Things that are shaped like noodles are not pasta, in any way. Putting spaghetti sauce on them just reminds me that I can’t have pasta. I’ve tried spaghetti squash spaghetti. It tastes like spaghetti squash. Which is fine, but don’t suggest it to me as a “replacement” for pasta! There is NOTHING about it that is like pasta, except (sort of) the shape. And I don’t think that it lends itself all that well to red sauce. It’s not a great flavor combination. Never once have I had a low-carb acolyte suggest to me that I should roast an acorn squash and top it with red sauce. Because it’s the wrong shape, duh!

Cucumber slices and cottage cheese are not potato chips and dip. (Thanks for that one, Dr. Oz.).

Cauliflower in a bagel shape covered in everything bagel topping is not an everything bagel.

Cheesy mashed cauliflower is delicious, I’ve made it and loved it. But stop suggesting it as a “replacement” for mashed potatoes. The only thing they have in common is that they’re both white. (And mashed, I guess.)

Making cauliflower into a bread-slice shape doesn’t make it bread any more than making bacon into a bread-sliced shape would make it bread.

And seriously, what’s with all the cauliflower fake-outs? Is it because cauliflower is white? Because you can chop it up tiny and kind-of make it into a dough? I bet that would work with a lot of vegetables, but cauliflower has been designated the go-to low-carb imposter.

Trying to mimic one food with a totally different one sets me up for disappointment. On the other hand, good recipes that just happen to be low-carb get me excited.

I guess I just hate a bait-and-switch.

Would I be more open to things like cauliflower pizza crust and spaghetti squash spaghetti if I were doing this for longer than six weeks? Probably. But I’m not, so I don’t care. This is just about getting through the next 30 days.

Do I sound cranky? I am. BECAUSE I HAVEN’T HAD CARBS IN TWELVE DAYS.