Pizza toast

Ingredients

Primo pizza sauce

sliced brown bread

Mastro sliced salami with prosciutto

mushrooms

green peppers

anchovies

mozzarella cheese

Directions 

This is one of my guilty pleasures. I crave pizza more than any other type of food. This lazy man's version is certainly fast and tastes so much better than any franchise take out pizzerias in my neighbourhood. Most are flavourless cardboard. I'd be better off buying a store bought frozen pizza for 20% of the cost. I'm not saying all pizzerias are bad, but the good ones are few and far between. At least in my neighbourhood. Considering a pie costs $25 and upwards, pizza is no longer an affordable meal like it used to be. I still indulge in a real pizza from time to time, but not as often as I used to.

I've listed the typical ingredients I use for my pizza toast, but you can use whatever ingredients you like. For convenience, I use the primo pizza sauce that dispenses from a bottle, which stores nicely in the refrigerator. The ones in tins are a nuisance. 

For the mushrooms I usually buy whole and slice them myself, but a lot of grocery stores sell pre-sliced. I haven't found the same option for green peppers or anchovies so there's some prep work involved. The green peppers are a good source of vitamin C and the anchovies have lots of Omega 3. A good counter to the sodium nitrates in the salami. Oh and I use brown bread for the extra fiber.

I prefer mozzarella cheese in block form instead of shredded. The shredded is much more convenient, but they use an anti-caking agent to prevent the cheese from clumping such as potato starch, cellulose or calcium sulfate (gypsum) and this affects how well the cheese melts. Natamycin is also added to the shredded cheese to inhibit the growth of mold. Sliced mozzarella is the most convenient, but you only get less than half the amount of a brick for the same price. 

To bake the pizza toast I use a toaster oven and elevate the bread off the tray using a rack. This allows the heat to circulate under the bread making the bottom crispy. The only drawback is that I can only make 4 at a time in the toaster oven. Maybe that's not a bad thing as it restricts how much I eat. I can inhale twice that number in one sitting - easy. Not good considering one slice is approximately 200-250 calories.