The Unexpected Ingredient You Should Add To Your Pizza

When you think about pizza ingredients, particularly unexpected ones, you're probably picturing some kind of topping. After all, while pineapple pizza has been more or less a thing for decades despite its widespread unpopularity (maybe people keep ordering it as a joke?), there are still a bunch of oddball toppings out there such as avocado (not nearly such a hit on pizza as it is on toast), honey (even Aldi embraced this trend), pickles (some people like this combo), and kiwi fruit (ugghh, why??). You can also level up your homemade pizza sauce with add-ons, including Parmesan cheese, wine vinegar, and fish sauce (no, seriously, it's nearly undetectable but adds a little umami zing).

This particular secret ingredient hack, however, is something you can add to your homemade pizza crust to boost nutrition. Believe it or not, it's oatmeal! No, wait, it's not as gross as it sounds, After all, we're talking about using the dried stuff, not a disgusting bowl of congealed breakfast leftovers.

While the term "superfood" is so overused as to be practically meaningless by now, oatmeal is just plain healthy. It's vitamin and fiber-rich, protein-packed, and may be able to help you lower your bad cholesterol and your blood pressure and maybe even lose a little weight. If you don't care for oatmeal in its plain form, it's also surprisingly easy to sneak into baked goods, including pizza crust, without sacrificing any of its nutritional benefits.

In order to make an oatmeal-based pizza crust, you'll need to grind up a cup of rolled oats in a food processor to make coarse oat flour. Mix the ground oats with a pinch of salt, a quarter teaspoon of baking powder, three egg whites, and a quarter cup of milk (or you could always use oat milk for some extra oaty-ness). Pour the dough/batter into a pizza tray (which you might want to line with parchment to prevent it from sticking), then bake the crust at about 380 degrees for 8 to 10 minutes. Once it's done, sauce it, cheese it and top it as you would any other pizza crust. It will taste just as good, and since the addition of oatmeal makes your pizza healthier, you've now got a great excuse to have an extra slice.