I bet every single person that decided to go vegan after years of their “regular” diet, thought of at least one food they are going to miss. For me it was pizza. It was the one thing I was sure I was going to miss. A lot. You see, I have always been a big cheese lover, especially if it was on pizza or in a toast. I think I ate cheese almost every day. But going vegan meant saying goodbye to that melted deliciousness.

I think I slipped two or three times, meaning I dig into a proper cheesy pizza, even though I was supposed to be vegan. But it wasn’t as satisfying as it was before. So I decided that it was time to really say goodbye to it. 

And so we tried to make a vegan pizza. We didn’t even look for a recipe or anything, just bought a bunch of vegetables that we could put on the dough, to make it look like a proper pizza. We covered the dough with tomatoes, grated some carrots and courgettes, diced an onion and sprinkled everything with corn. And it turned out … not as bad as we thought it would. It was pretty dry and plain, but it was a start. Not bad for our first try I think. The plan was to try and make it again and get the perfect recipe for a moist and delicious cheeseless pizza. 

Even if we are not into artificial vegan stuff and more the “stick-to-your-vegetables” vegans, we said that maybe we should give a chance to some kind of vegan cheese. So first we tried MozzaRisella, which is based on whole rice and we weren’t satisfied with the result. It had no real taste, at least not the one you would want to have on your pizza. It tasted like salted overcooked rice. So we decided to part with it. 

And then we heard about the Violife cheese, a cheese that was suppose to change everything. We read a lot of reviews and stories about these cheeses, even one about a girl that replaced normal cheese on her pizza with Violife and how nobody at the dinner noticed the change. Everybody praised them, so we were really excited to try them out. We bought two, mozzarella taste (that was on sale), which we used for a toast, and the one for making a pizza, which we put on a pizza. And the result? A salty and sticky mess. It reminded us of snot (yuck!). The taste was not that bad, except for the fact that it’s very salty. But otherwise, an OK taste for an artificial cheese. But I guess we put too much of it on our pizza. And I was quite disappointed. 

When we heard that they serve it also on pizzas in one of the best pizza places in Ljubljana, we decided that maybe we should give it another try. But the result, at least for me, wasn’t that much better. So it has been decided, sorry fake-cheese, but comparing to a bunch of vegetables we would otherwise put on our pizza, you lose. 

Just shortly after this realization, one lazy Sunday, we made a cheeseless pizza again, this time just courgettes (properly salted and soaked in olive oil), peppers and corn. And it was the best vegan pizza I had until then. Really delicious, properly moist, tasty. We didn't even miss the cheese. The real or the vegan one. And we have been making it like this ever since. We add onions from time to time or some garlic in the tomato sauce and always a lot of basil and oregano. Also, if we make the dough ourselves (we prefer hemp or at least wholegrain dough), we have to make sure it's salty enough. We realized that the cheese is probably the one thing that makes the regular pizza salty enough. So now we have to compensate that taste with the dough and the vegetables.