Pizza

Hello! Welcome to Beyond Soy!

Ah, Pizza. Ashley and I both love pizza. We have a standing rule in our house that if dinner gets messed up (burned, etc) we order pizza. But, unfortunately not all pizza is soy-free. Today's post will focus on takeout or delivery pizza, but in a couple weeks we'll also provide homemade pizza and pizza bread recipes for you to check out.

The good news first: Some delivery pizza places don’t use soy!

The bad news second: Lots of pizza places do use soy. (Domino's, Pizza Hut, and Papa John's pizzas all contain soy)

We’ve found that the crust and grilled chicken are the two places that have the potential for soy in pizza. Generally, local pizza places (that make their crust in-house) are safe to eat. Whereas larger chains (that might distribute their dough from a factory) generally have soy. This makes sense because pizza crust is essentially bread, which is a common place to find soy.

As always, when you go out to get pizza be sure to check if the pizza place has an allergen menu or don’t be afraid to call and ask about soy-free options. Calling pizza places ahead of time is really easy to do because they just have to check the pizza recipe (whereas calling a sit-down restaurant with many meal choices is harder since there are so many meal options).

One of the difficulties we've encountered with pizza is how often it is provided as a lunch or dinner. Since pizza is a near universally accepted food, it is often the default food provided for groups (e.g., pizza and beer when you help someone move). It is pretty terrible to show up at a lunch meeting only to realize that the lunch is pizza that you can't eat. Equally uncomfortable is having to ask ahead of time if lunch will be pizza and specify that you can only eat certain brands of pizza.

Of course, it all depends on who is ordering the pizza. We have no problems telling our friends that they can only order soy-free pizza for us, but we can't do that comfortably when someone we don't know is providing the food. Ultimately it depends on how comfortable you are specifying that some pizza places are off limits.

The best practice that we've identified is to be open about Ashley's intolerance with the people around us, but also recognize that sometimes she'll have to go pizza-free. Having a couple soy-free snacks on hand in case she can't eat any provided food is also a good idea.

Pizza can be surprisingly important to figure out. Once you know what pizza you can eat, it can serve as a decent back-up meal plan and take some of the stress out of living soy-free. Plus, it is delicious!