Once a month we’re featuring a new family-friendly dish from the Hatfields for our Kids Can Cook section. The dairy-free teen cooking star is Katherine and this week she and her “mama”, Sarah, are making homemade pizza! They use a classic dairy-free dough recipe complete with a super-easy sauce. Sarah has the pictures and details for us.
In the early days of food allergy parenting, I always made sure to have a special dessert on hand wherever we went. A shelf-stable treat in my purse, dairy-free ice cream sandwiches and dairy-free cupcakes in the school freezer, and dairy-free pies for family gatherings were essential. For teenagers, the essential food item is pizza. Pizza for youth group, pizza when a class wins a prize, pizza for gatherings with friends, pizza at sporting events, and pizza for marching band dinners. Pizza is essential for middle school and high school. Honestly, I think it’s essential for adulthood, too!
This dough recipe, which you may recognize from our Pepperoni Roll and Cinnamon Streusel Dessert Pizza recipes, makes enough for six dairy-free homemade pizza crusts. I know that is a lot of crust! But you can freeze the dough and pull it out to bake whenever you need. Social events are often planned at the last minute, and having the dough on hand has saved us many times. It’s also great to pull out for an impromptu dinner party. You can also use the frozen dough for the Pepperoni Rolls and Cinnamon Streusel Dessert Pizza. This is a versatile dough recipe that we almost always have on hand in the freezer.
Nonetheless, if this sounds like too much dough for your household, you can easily cut the recipe in half. That will make three pizza crusts: one to bake and two to freeze.
Our favorite quick pizza sauce is also included in this homemade pizza recipe. But another sauce option is dairy-free ranch dressing. For toppings, we do sometimes use dairy-free cheese, but sometimes we skip it. Katherine’s favorite toppings for a cheeseless pizza are bacon and black olives. Their saltiness and richness make a surprisingly great substitute for cheese.
Special Diet Notes:Â Mama’s Dairy-Free Homemade Pizza
By ingredients, this recipe is dairy-free / non-dairy, egg-free, nut-free, peanut-free, soy-free, and optionally vegan and vegetarian, depending on the toppings you choose!
- 1 15-ounce can tomato sauce (I use Aldi SimplyNature Organic Tomato Sauce)
- 2 teaspoons olive oil
- 2 teaspoons sugar
- 1 teaspoon garlic powder
- 27 fluid ounces water (3⅜ cups)
- 1 tablespoon instant yeast
- ⅓ cup sugar
- 1106 grams all-purpose flour (approximately 8¾ cups)
- 1 tablespoon Kosher salt
- 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
- Cornmeal, for dusting
- Your favorite dairy-free pizza toppings
- Whisk all of the ingredients together in a saucepan.
- Heat over medium heat for 5 minutes.
- Let the sauce cool before spreading on the pizza.
- Microwave the water until just tepid, approximately 30 to 45 seconds.
- Add the yeast and sugar to the warm water.
- Add the salt to the flour, and slowly stir into the water mixture, about a heaping tablespoon at a time.
- When the dough can be handled, knead well for approximately 10 minutes, either with a dough hook mixer attachment or by hand.
- Brush the inside of a large bowl with 1 tablespoon of the oil.
- Put the dough in the oiled bowl, turn it over, cover with a clean dish cloth, and let it rise until doubled, anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes.
- Punch down the dough and place it on a floured cutting board.
- Cut the dough in half, then cut each half in thirds, to make six equal portions.
- Freezing: If you are not baking six pizzas, place each of the dough portions you are freezing into quart-size freezer bags. Remove the air from the bags, seal and freeze. When you want to use a frozen crust, remove it from the freezer and let it thaw at room temperature. Then proceed with the rest of the recipe.
- Place a rack on the bottom of the oven, and preheat the oven to 450ÂşF.
- Sprinkle a teaspoon of cornmeal on a pizza pan.
- Stretch one of the dough portions until it fits the pan.
- Spread the pizza sauce on the dough.
- Top with your favorite dairy-free toppings.
- Bake on the lowest rack of the oven for 15 minutes.
- Immediately remove the pizza from the pan and place on a cooling rack.
- Let cool for 5 to 10 minutes, then place on a cutting board, slice and serve.
- Leftover slices can be refrigerated or frozen. Frozen slices make convenient lunchbox additions!

4 Comments
Yum! Looks delicious! And I LOVE cornmeal on the bottom of my crust. So tasty!
This is so great! I am inspired to make some homemade pizza soon. We aren’t dairy free but I think it’s so important to have some really good recipes handy just in case we have friends over that avoid dairy.
Nice! People always knock me for my cheese-free pizzas, but they can be pretty good! Personally, I load up on pepperoni; I find the grease and salt make a good cheese substitute. (Sadly, it doesn’t act like a glue like cheese does; any additional toppings still fall off. Oh well, still better than most imitation cheeses!)
We do the same thing Keith, though I hadn’t thought about the lack of “glue” – that’s so true!