A couple of weeks ago, on my way home from teaching a workshop at Seattle CoderDojo, I stopped at MOD Pizza to get a salad before grabbing some McDonald’s for my wife and kids.
Let me say now that I love MOD Pizza. Their pizzas are great, and when I’m trying to be a good boy, they offer the best bang for your buck in town when it comes to salads. My family and I have been going to MOD for over a decade.
This time they had a sign on the counter, advertising a cauliflower crust. Intriguing. I asked about the ingredients and about the only thing I could hear above the noise was “like on Oprah.”
As a low-carber / semi-paleo kind of guy (eliminating starches from my diet lets me eliminate insulin needles from my diabetes management), I’ve tried a couple of disappointing attempts at a cauliflower crust pizza. But if MOD was selling one, let’s see what they could do.
When I got it home… Oh baby. Chewy, cheesy, crispy. Seriously, This is the crust I’d serve to God if He came over for pizza. It wasn’t just a great cauliflower crust, it was a great crust period. The taste and texture were so spot-on. I could live the rest of my life having this instead of a “bread” crust and feel like I was WINNING.
I figured there was no way you got this with just caulifloweer, eggs, and cheese, so I went to their web site to look up the nutritional info. It wasn’t there!!!
I contacted their customer service by email, by phone, by email again a week later. I needed to know if I could have this in my life and still maintain my relatively strict diet. Today, I got an apology for not having it online (because it’s in test phase) and the nutritional info with ingredients…
84 grams of carbs (though bravo on only 6 of them being sugars), rice flour, tapioca starch, rice starch, modified food starch, and cultured brown rice. If you’re a low-carber, keto, paleo, this cauliflower crust isn’t quite going to work for you.
If you don’t give a damn about carbs, grains, or starches and you just want a better gluten-free option, it is so damn good and you will feel blessed to put it in your mouth.
Sadly, despite hopes of cauliflower crusting my way through MOD’s menu until I sprouted leaves, this will keep MOD’s pizza a “cheat day” item for me. But when I have a cheat day, it’s going to be this crust. And until that cheat day, I’ll still be a massive fan of the MOD salad.
Thank you Greg for you diligence in finding the ingredients to the Cauliflower crust. I too am a MOD fan, eating there at least 2-3 times a month. I have avoided MOD recently as I have begun working my way into the KETO diet. I was so excited that this could mean I would be able to indulge without guilt. I ordered it today and fell in love. I was attempting to go online tonight to find out what the ingredients were and “wallah” there was you post. I knew it was too good to be true. Oh well, I agree it will just have to be my cheat day pizza. 🙂
84 grams of carbs in a slice? Or the whole pizza?
The whole pizza (not including sauce and toppings).