Chia Flour Pizza Dough
Speed - 96%
Simplicity - 100%
Tastiness - 99%
98%
Delicious!
Earthy. . . crisp. . . chia flour works for this pizza dough and may yet be the best gluten-free pizza crust I've ever tasted. The freshness from the basil pesto perfectly elevated the crust's flavor.
Ingredients
For the Chia Flour Pizza Dough
- 1 Cup Chia Flour
- 1 Cup Brown Rice Flour
- 3/4 Cup Warm Water
- 1/4 Cup olive oil
- 2 Teaspoons Active Dry Yeast
- 1 Teaspoon Sugar
For the Toppings
- 1/4 Cup Pesto
- 1/3 Cup Cream Cheese
- 1 Piece Chicken Breast Fillet cut into strips
- Salt to taste
- Pepper to taste
Instructions
- Combine the yeast, sugar, and water in a bowl. Set aside for 10 minutes.
- Whisk together the chia flour, brown rice flour, and salt.
- Add the active yeast mixture into the dry ingredients.
- Knead the dough and set aside for 30 minutes in a lightly oiled bowl.
- Flatten the dough with a rolling pin.
- Set the dough onto a baking pan.
- Top your pizza.
- Bake for 20 minutes at 425F.
This pizza is excellent. The earthy flavor from the chia flour and the fresh aromatic flavor of fresh basil pesto proved to be a very good combination.
I had a large jar of chia seeds standing in my pantry, waiting to be put to good use. Why not grind my own flour out of it?
A coffee grinder is more than good enough to turn those chia seeds into flour. It also takes less than a minute per batch to get them fine. In fact, grinding them for longer would heat up those chia seeds and make them release some moisture – not something you would like if you have plans of storing your flour for later use.
Meanwhile, let's get our yeast activated in a mixture of sugar and warm water.
This is actually my first attempt to bake with chia flour. I used it in an equal ratio with brown rice flour and was quite happy with the results. I'll certainly try out some recipes in the future, using chia flour exclusively.
Once the yeast is all foamy, stir it into the dry ingredients together with the olive oil.
The dough will come together really easy. Give it a few minutes of kneading to provide it with more elasticity.
Leave the dough in a lightly oiled bowl for about half an hour to rise.
The dough will rise a bit but it won't double in volume, as you might expect from using ordinary flour.
This dough will be really smooth and easy to work with. Flatten it with a rolling pin and set it on a baking pan to pre-bake for 5-7 minutes at 425F.
The toppings go on next. This simple combination of chicken, cheese, and pesto is indeed a must try.
Finish baking your pizza for another 10-15 minutes at 425F.
This is definitely the best gluten-free thin crust pizza I've ever had.
Add some smoky wood flavor to your chia pizza by making it outdoors on a grill!
Chia Flour
Chia seeds have become exceptionally popular as a ‘superfood’ and they are packed with nutrition, including fiber and omega-3 fatty acids. For this reason alone, chia flour makes a great choice for gluten-free cooking. In fact, chia flour can give you more access to the nutrients than regular chia seeds, especially as the flour is easier for your body to digest.
At the same time, chia flour has a fairly neutral flavor, which means that you can easily use it in a wide range of different recipes.
When baking with it, chia flour can often be used is a 1-to-1 manner with regular wheat flour. It’s also common to use the flour as I have in this recipe, where you are combining equal amounts of chia and brown rice flour. You could also do the same approach with another gluten-free flour instead of brown rice flour if you wanted to.
Making Chia Flour
As I showed in this recipe, you can also prepare your own chia flour, simply by grinding up chia seeds. If you do so, just make sure you don’t grind them for longer than necessary (about a minute).
The seeds are small anyway, so it doesn’t take much to get the right consistency for flour. Plus, too much grinding heats the seeds up and isn’t good for the shelf life of your flour.
Should You Use Chia Flour?
Personally, I loved the way this chia flour dough turned out and the flour was easy to work with. In this case, I paired the flour with brown rice flour but other combinations would probably work well. These aspects can make chia flour a good choice in many situations.
Still, as with other wheat flour alternatives, the suitability is going to depend on your diet.
Chia seeds are interesting in this case. Like quinoa, they are technically seeds, not grains. But, they are often treated like grains and have some similarities. As a consequence, some diets will exclude chia along with grains and grain-like ingredients.
But, there is much more debate surrounding chia seeds than products like quinoa. For example, some paleo followers entirely exclude chia seeds for similar reasons to grains. But, others still rely on chia seeds and consider them a nutritious diet addition.
Likewise, you will often find recipes like this Grain-Free Chia Bread. The recipe uses chia seeds (not chia flour, in this case) but is still considered suitable for both paleo and the GAPS diet.
Even with this limitation, chia seeds end up working well for many people. They are even common on the keto diet, partly because your serving size is often fairly small. As a result, chia flour can work well for keto too, providing you pay attention to the overall carb count of the finished dish.
Ingredients
For the Chia Flour Pizza Dough
- 1 Cup Chia Flour
- 1 Cup Brown Rice Flour
- 3/4 Cup Warm Water
- 1/4 Cup olive oil
- 2 Teaspoons Active Dry Yeast
- 1 Teaspoon Sugar
For the Toppings
- 1/4 Cup Pesto
- 1/3 Cup Cream Cheese
- 1 Piece Chicken Breast Fillet cut into strips
- Salt to taste
- Pepper to taste
Instructions
- Combine the yeast, sugar, and water in a bowl. Set aside for 10 minutes.
- Whisk together the chia flour, brown rice flour, and salt.
- Add the active yeast mixture into the dry ingredients.
- Knead the dough and set aside for 30 minutes in a lightly oiled bowl.
- Flatten the dough with a rolling pin.
- Set the dough onto a baking pan.
- Top your pizza.
- Bake for 20 minutes at 425F.
Kimm says
July 10, 2017 at 7:46 amHi there.
Thanks for the recipe.
Just wondering if you need to increase liquids when substituting chia flour for wheat? Chia absorbs a lot of liquid, like coconut flour.
Thanks.
Food For Net says
July 10, 2017 at 3:04 pmI’ve never done a direct substitution from wheat to chia, so I can’t say for sure. However, for this recipe with chia and rice flour, the recipe calls for two cups of flour and 3/4 cup water. A typical pizza recipe will also have two cups of flour to 3/4 cup of water, so I assume 100% chia would not be any different. It also depends on what you’re making too. For pizza dough, you can add or take away water without much consequence. For something like a cake or bread, you may get different results.