Pizza Party!

Happy National Pizza Party Day! Pizza is one of those foods that is really ingrained into society in the US, and it can be one of the harder ones to give up when you go on dialysis. I’m going to offer you some of the tips and tricks we use to satiate mom’s hunger for pizza while watching all the minerals that can interfere with her health. The main ones I watch out for with a more processed food like this are sodium (it’s in everything!), potassium (tomatoes are the main culprit here), and phosphorous (this gets added to so many things too!).

I found a gluten-free crust (we have restrictions outside of mom’s) that we tried last night to celebrate. It was the 365 Everyday Gluten-Free Pizza Crust Dough Mix. I’ll be putting up a Tik Tok here that has the box and pictures of us making the pizzas. We used the box mix, baked it, put on olive oil for “sauce” with some garlic (powder because we didn’t have fresh garlic), a little parmesan (mom’s dietician said it was ok!), some tomato slices to get the sauce flavor, some vegan cheese, some onion, and some Italian seasoning. They came out delicious and way better than I thought they would. I split the dough into three parts so we each had our own personal pan pizza.

Here are some ideas for toppings:

• Baked chicken breast

• Ground beef (season it with homemade taco seasoning)

• Bacon bits like these (make sure you watch the total sodium you are adding.)

• Onion

• Bell peppers

• Tomato (Small slices or chunks that are low potassium servings)

• Broccoli

• Zucchini

• Corn

• Lettuce/Cabbage

• Button mushrooms

• Hot peppers

• Vegan cheese like this one. (or parmesan if your dietician says it’s ok)

• Seasonings (Italian/Garlic/Onion/Cayenne Pepper/Whatever you like!)

You can also try a local pizza place, they tend to be more likely to have specialty toppings and sauces. Papa Murphy’s Take and Bake or a similar franchise is most likely your best kidney-friendly bet. We are able to order mom’s pizza with really low sodium and potassium contents. We order it without the cheese and add our own so that we know it isn’t a nut-based cheese or one with a lot of phosphorous.

You can also make your own crust by hand, just remember if the recipe has baking soda in it to cut the salt completely since you’ll have salt in the baking soda. If there’s no baking soda, add a small amount of salt, but try half or less of what the recipe calls for. Most people would rather get sodium from toppings than the crust, and the flavor is more noticeably absent from toppings than the crust.

I hope you enjoy your pizza!

**I have used affiliate links for ingredients in this particular blog so that I can link to the exact ones we use and monetize our blog a bit for future ingredients.