- Rachel's going to pass out when she sees this.
Oh my God.
The tofu never fails.
- Are we professional pizza chefs?
No.
- Hey, what's up everybody.
It's your girl Merle.
- And I'm Rachel.
- Damn right you are.
And today we are...
- [Both] ...eight feet apart.
- Buzzfeed is taking COVID precautions.
So we are social distancing today
and you should too, until everyone can get vaccinated.
- Today we're going to be making two vegan pizzas
at two different price points.
- So one of us is going to have a $5 budget
and the other one's going to have a $35 budget.
But in order to make this fair
we're going to flip a coin to see who gets, which budget.
How about heads will be expensive and tails will be cheap.
(suspenseful music)
(chuckles)
- Heads.
- So expensive.
- I'm doing the expensive one.
- Oh my God, okay.
That means I'm doing...
- Oh boy.
- ...the cheap one.
- So today Aria can not be joining us so our good friend
Jasmine is going to be here instead to test taste
and decide which pizza has the best value.
Alright, so Merle's going to start first.
So let's go.
- So I'm going to be trying to make a $5 pepperoni pizza.
Even though we only have $5, I'm going to try to
infuse as much flavor in there as I possibly can.
The base ingredients of this are flour and water,
so pretty cheap.
So I'm just going to add in my water, flour, instant yeast
or active dry yeast and one teaspoon of salt.
Then I'm just going to mix this together until it is smooth.
Be gentle with the little yeastlings.
That's not what they are called, but they are alive.
Now I'm just going to cover it up
and let it rest for five minutes.
Let's turn her out, here I come.
I'm going to knead this dough
for about two to three minutes until it is nice and smooth.
If you are like, I've never made pizza dough before,
don't feel daunted, it's totally doable.
And it's not that scary.
Trust me.
It is about good to go.
I'm going to lightly spray my bowl.
In you go, we one.
I'm just going to cover this up again
and we are going to let it rest
for an hour and a half in a warm place.
So now we're going to make our pepperoni.
I always love pepperoni pizza.
That was my go-to.
I'm not proud of this
but I used to eat three pepperoni pizzas a day
when I was in college, little ones, personal ones but still.
I'm going to be adding some extra-firm tofu that I pressed
for a little bit and we're going to add a lot of seasoning.
I've got Brown sugar here, soy sauce, paprika,
smoked paprika, fennel seeds,
garlic powder, red pepper flakes
and a half a teaspoon of salt.
Now I'm just going to blend all this together
until it is smooth and evenly combined.
Let's have a little taster Ru.
Oh my God.
That is the essence of pepperoni.
That's like the cologne of pepperoni.
We're going to spray down a baking sheet.
I'm going to just smooth this out a little bit
so it's kind of even.
Now I've got my sprayed parchment paper.
We're gonna press it down
so that our pepperoni slab is pretty evenly
one eighth of an inch all the way around.
Now I'm going to peel the parchment paper off.
How satisfying is that?
We're going to bake this at 425 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's 220 degrees Celsius.
We're going to let it bake for about eight to ten minutes
until the corners get golden brown and a little crispy.
So now that it's out of the oven, we're going to go ahead
and make our little pepperoni babies.
And what I'm using is an old kombucha cap.
The cheap squad.
I'm going to press right in there.
Ooh, that feels good.
- Hello Merle?
- Oh my!
- What are you doing over there?
It smells like pepperoni in here.
- You don't say.
- Where did you scrounge up that old bottle cap.
In my cabinet?(chuckles)
- Listen, I never go anywhere
without checking to see if there are extra bottle caps.
(chuckles)
Try not to let this mess with your head.
- I'm going to have a lot of money
so I don't need to carve out my own pepperonis.
- Will said it's character building Rachel.
Now that we've got our little cutouts here
I'm going to flip those over with a butter knife.
Wow!
This are like legit.
Tofu never fails guys.
Veganism 101.
Ooh. That's very satisfying.
Wow. Feel like it's about to singe my nose hairs.
That is really good.
All right, I've got these all flipped over.
Now we're just going to put these back
in the oven for five more minutes.
Now it's time for us to make our vegan cheese
and I bet you've never heard of one made like this.
We're going to be using potatoes.
Cheap.
♪ She's a very cheapy girl. ♪
♪ The kind you don't bring home to mother. ♪
That was just for me.
We're going to boil our potatoes
for about eight minutes until they are fork tender.
We are going to set our pan aside to cool for 10 minutes.
Let's put our cooked potatoes along with the potato water
into this adorable little food processor.
Now we're going to add in our seasoning; flour, corn starch,
apple cider vinegar, nutritional yeast
and a half a teaspoon of salt.
Now we're going to blend her all together.
(blender whirring)
Oh, smells wild.
She might smell funky,
but she's going to do the trick.
You just wait and see.
I'm going to add this back to my pot over a medium
low heat to allow it to thicken up a little bit more.
And if yours is too thick, you can just add a little water
to it until you get it to the right consistency.
So I'm going to take this off the heat.
And it's time to roll out our dough.
I'm going to lightly dust some flour and let's roll her out.
Come to mama.
I'm going to just use my hands
and like stretch it out just a little bit,
and then I'm going to roll her out.
All right, it's looking good.
Lay it out into our baking sheet.
And we're just going to go ahead
and just pour some good old tomato sauce on there.
This huge canvas for $5.
Are you kidding me right now?
Rachel's going to pass out when she sees this.
She's going to drop dead right on the floor.
I didn't mean to say it with a smile.
I love Rachel.
Now we're going to take our cheese mixture
and I know what you're thinking.
It's mashed potatoes,
but no it's not because it's all about perception, guys.
So I'm going to doll up here, doll up there
so that it can spread the love across our canvas.
Remember the pepperoni,
we're going to add our little tofu nugget
pepperonis onto the pizza
and you see how the canvas is filling up.
Lastly, I'm going to take my cooking spray
and I'm going to spray it quickly over the top.
Now we're going to bake this at 500 degrees Fahrenheit,
that's 260 degrees Celsius,
and we're going to let that bake for eight minutes
and then we're going to broil it for two to three minutes
at the end there until it gets nice and brown.
Finally, we are making our Basil drizzle.
What we are lacking in budget,
we are making up for in gumption.
So we are going to add some Basil,
fun little hack to save money,
is to supplement with a little bit of spinach.
You get some nutritional value
and you can bulk it out a little bit.
Cause Basil can get expensive.
You have some garlic, olive oil.
(blender whirring)
I'm going to add just a wee bit,
of nutritional yeast in place of Parmesan.
(blender whirring)
Now we just want to drizzle it over our pizza.
It's really coming together now.
Our pizza is looking fabulous
and now it's Rachel's turn to give it a whirl
with her big old budget.
- So I have a massive budget.
So I figured I might as well make a deep dish pizza
because I can just fit more things into it.
First thing we're going to do is make our dough.
I'm going to add some water to a bowl,
make sure it's room temperature or a little bit warm.
Gonna add in a little bit of sugar
a whole packet of instant yeast and then some coconut oil
which is just going to give it this really nice flaky crust.
It's a little expensive, but we're splurging today.
Now I'm going to add in my flour,
a little bit of corn meal and some salt.
I just want to mix it until there aren't any dry spots left.
And now I'm just going to cover it
with my dish towel and let this sit for about five minutes.
So now I'm just going to turn it out.
So I just want to knead it for a couple of minutes
and now we're just to take our bowl
and give it a little spray with some oil.
I'm going to pop this back in here
and let this rest for about one hour so it can rise.
If your apartment is too cold, take a blanket
and you can actually wrap up your little dough baby
because if your apartment is too cold
your dough is going to take much longer to rise.
Make sure it's nice and toasty in there.
So while my dough is resting,
I'm going to make some tomato sauce.
First,
I'm just going to add a little bit of olive oil in here.
About one tablespoon of tomato paste, garlic, some salt
and then some Italian seasoning.
Stir this up some more.
I'm using San Marzano tomatoes.
They're a little bit pricier
but they're definitely worth it for the flavor they have.
Oh this smell good and I'm going to let this cook
for about 30 minutes to an hour.
You don't want our sauce to be too watery
in our deep dish pizza
because then it can get too wet and soggy.
The longer you cook it, the better it's going to taste.
So now I'm going to get started
on what's going into this deep dish pizza.
I decided to just get the most expensive ingredients
I could possibly I think of.
Some beyond meat sausages, which are so good.
And I really think that these kinds of vegan alternatives
are going to come down in price over the next several years
because there's so much less resource intensive
than animal products.
And then I'm just going to add my bell peppers.
It's kind of crazy to me that you can go
to the drive-thru and get a $1 hamburger
but a single bell pepper costs more money than that.
That is a very flawed system in my opinion.
I'm also going to season our peppers
with a little bit of salt.
You're nice and toasty.
You can see all the oil that is coming off.
So I'm just going to use it to mix with our peppers here.
And now I'm going to cut up our little sausages.
Ooh. And they're like nice and juicy on the inside.
And now let us see
if our little dough baby has grown in his slumber.
Ooh, it looks good.
So now I'm going to walk him out of here.
This isn't even like too hard of a rolling job
because this thing is already pretty enormous.
If you're really bad at rolling out pizza
this might be the recipe for you.
Now I'm just going to transfer it onto the pan.
If it's not totally even on all sides, it's okay.
Are we professional pizza chefs?
No.
So we're good going to start off
with some of my favorite vegan mozzarella cheese, Violife.
And I'm just going to really just go crazy with it
because we got to spend these dollars somehow.
If you think it's enough cheese it's not, it's not enough.
Now I'm going to layer on our bell peppers.
Spread these out a little and now our sausages.
♪ This is gonna be bomb. ♪
All right, so I'm going to hit it with the sauce,
it's nice and thick, just how we like it.
Now we're going to add about half of a bunch of curly kale
and this is going to bake down.
And I'm going to give this kale a nice healthy drizzle
of this fancy roasted garlic olive oil.
We're living large we might as well go all out.
Now I'm going to add on my vegan mozzarella Miyoko's brand
made out of cashews,
because one layer of cheese is not enough for this pizza
and support an amazing Asian American owned business.
One type of cheese in two different forms isn't enough.
We're going to go in with the vegan Parmesan.
We're going to bake this at 450 degrees Fahrenheit
which is 232 degrees Celsius, I think.
And we're going to bake it for about 26 to 28 minutes.
Oh my God.
This pizza looks so good.
I'm very happy with how this came out.
It smells amazing.
It looks amazing.
The cheese melted
to the best of cashew cheese's melting ability.
And I am so excited for Jasmine to try this.
- Okay, Jasmine, it is the moment of truth.
- Don't mind us we'll just be here in the background,
not bitter about which one you choose or don't choose.
- We made for you a deep dish pizza, which is
on the left and on the right is a pepperoni vegan pizza
with some basil drizzle on top.
- Okay. I'm very honest you know this.
- We love that about you.
- All right.
Hmm. This is really good.
- Can not make reactions.
- Oh right, sorry.
The pepperoni's tastes like bean curd.
- That's very insightful.
- It's really good.
I really liked the crust.
I think the pesto adds a great touch as well.
The cheese.
Hm. Honestly it tastes like cheese.
- Wow. Really?
- There's nothing that I would change about this pizza.
- Okay.
- Let's try this one that I guess I need a fork for.
This is so good.
Could never tell that would be vegan.
Jesus!
There's nothing I would change about that pizza either.
Like these are really good.
- So the pizza on the right is $5 for the entire pizza.
And then the one
on your left cost of $35 for the entire pizza.
So now knowing both price points
which one would you say has the best value overall?
- Obviously very different hard to compare
deep dish versus like a thin slice pizza.
But I would pick...
...this one.
(rock music)
- Merle won.
(cast laughing)
- Merle won rich versus broke.
Merle won rich versus broke.
- This tastes like real cheese
and the pepperoni tastes amazing.
For $5 for the whole pizza, this was amazing.
Good job.
- Yay!
- Honestly,
I wouldn't change anything about this pizza either.
I would go for this for a fancy night,
but day to day I think I would go for this one.
- Well, Jasmine, I accept my loss graciously.
- Merle finally won the rich versus broke.
- Oh my God.
(rock music)