Meatza! Meatza!

So last night I made a meatza for the second time. For those of you who've not had or heard of a meatza, it's basically a pizza you make using ground beef for the crust.

I consider myself pretty carnivorous and I love pizza (Pizza and beer are make for the one-two punch to knock me completely off the paleo bandwagon*), but I have to confess: the notion of a meatza just didn't appeal to me at first blush. Plus, I'd made a few attempts at the almond flour crust pizza and been a bit disappointed. It's a lot of work to make an almond flour pizza, so when the result consistently disappointed, I just gave up on a low-carb pizza solution.

It was only when a few friends mentioned they had enjoyed meatza that I decided to give it a shot. I knew Richard had made meatza based off a meatza recipe from the Healthy Cooking Coach, so that's where I scrounged up the basic directions.

Now, making a pizza is as simple as making a crust, adding toppings, and baking it in the oven. With a meatza then, the most complicated part here is making the crust. And it's also the part that you've got to get right to make sure your meat pizza is delicious!

Enter my Italian grandfather's meatball recipe. My Pop has a fairly famous (within the family anyway) spaghetti recipe for sauce and meatballs. I'm going to skip the sauce part for now because it's a bit more labor-intensive. In a pinch, you can just use some spaghetti sauce from the store.

Anyway, it's the meatball recipe that really knocks the meatza crust out of the park, so without further ado, here are the ingredients:

1. I use a 12x17 rectangular pan
2. Get a decent sized mixing bowl to mix the meat
3. Start pre-heating the oven to 450
4. For ease of mixing into the beef, I go ahead and get all my seasonings out and into a little bowl (this will make more sense in a second):
   • 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese**
   • 3 tsp salt
   • 1 tsp caraway seeds (this is the magic ingredient in my opinion)
   • 1 tsp oregano
   • 1 tsp garlic salt
   • 1 tsp coarse ground pepper
   • 1 tsp red pepper flakes (optional)
   • 2 lbs. ground beef (80/20 is fine)
5. Seasonings mixed, put the beef into the mixing bowl, crack into it two eggs and mix beef and eggs first. This is because the runny egg can cause the seasonings to clump together and it just makes mixing a lot messier and less uniform if you don't mix beef and egg first prior to adding the seasonings. Thus, the need for to pre-mix the seasonings — your hands are all covered in beef at this point, so you just have to pour in the seasonings!
6. Add seasonings and Parmesan cheese and mix well! (Note: you can also do the Parmesan after the egg/beef pre-seasonings if you want)
7. Take the mass of mixed beef and slam it onto your pan. BAM!
8. Flatten it out: you should be able to just about cover a 12x17 pan with the beef
9. Oven pre-heated, throw it in there for 10 minutes!

At this point, I immediately start pre-cooking certain ingredients that need a little extra attention; in my case, it's sliced mushrooms and diced green pepper sauteeing in a cast iron skillet with some pasture butter.

Ten minutes up, take the crust out of the oven. Set the oven to Broil (it will take a few minutes to heat to this point).

You'll now notice the crust has shrunk considerably and there's a good bit of rendered fat in the pan. Pour the fat out of the pan. Optional step: take a paper towel and wipe up any extraneous beef "stuff" that is exterior to the crust. This is simply because it's not part of the crust and if you leave it, it could cake to the pan and make clean-up more of a hassle.

Now, you just add your toppings. For me, I added Newman's Sockerooni spaghetti sauce as a base, then a layer of pepperoni, then a base layer of mozarella cheese. From there, I add sliced green olives, feta cheese, the mushrooms and green peppers, more pepperoni, and top it all off with more cheese.

Broiler heated up, I throw it all back in the oven until the cheese is done. It cooks very fast at this point! Like five minutes is almost too long in our case, so make sure you keep a close eye on your meatza!

Take it out, let it sit for a minute or two, and slice and serve. I find this slices into six solid size pieces — I can eat a half a pizza under the right conditions, but one slice of meatza and I am good to go.

Enjoy!

Oh one more thing: I really like this alternative pizza combination. It is downright delicious and I don't get that "sigh this isn't really pizza" sensation at all. I'm not sure it is pizza, really, but it is really good, so who cares!

• Beer, chips, and salsa at Mexican restaurants being right up there, too.

** Were you to make the meatballs, you'd actually use two slices of bread, wet, and torn into small pieces OR 1 cup of plain bread crumbs (you can sub almond flour if you like)