Soy-Free Chicago-Style Pizza

Hello! Welcome to Beyond Soy!

As we've talked about before, it is fairly common for pizza to contain soy. This can make it a little difficult to find soy-free options when we are looking to eat pizza. When we are home, we know what pizza places have soy-free crust, but traveling introduces an additional element of uncertainty. That being said, Ashley and I were recently in Chicago and we knew that we HAD to eat deep dish pizza while we were there since it's so famous!

Soy-free deep dish pizza is a must in Chicago - IMAGE VIA PEXELS

We started by identifying several pizza restaurants that would be options for us to consider. We looked at Yelp, various recommendations from websites, and locations to find some restaurants that were close to us and highly recommended. This was no different than any other food/restaurant. Then came the food allergen part. To handle this, we searched through the websites of the restaurants we were considering to find allergen menus and determine what pizza options were soy-free. 

Based on their excellent allergen menu, we chose to go to Lou Malnati's because it was clear that soybean oil was identified as "soy" on their allergen menu (this isn't the case everywhere). Since we were confident that their pizza was soy-free, we didn't ask about ingredients at the restaurant and we had no qualms about eating their pizza. However, if we did have additional questions we would have asked our server.

By checking allergen menus we were able to find soy-free pizza - IMAGE VIA PEXELS

After doing all the upfront work, once we got to the restaurant we only had to order our pizza and enjoy it!
 
Overall, this process is not very different than selecting a restaurant without having a food requirement. We looked for allergen menus before we went to the restaurant, but that was our only specific soy-avoiding action. While we didn't choose to walk down the street and stumble upon a pizza place, we did have an excellent, soy-free Chicago-style deep dish pizza.