Make pizza a solid nutritional choice for kids
Kids love pizza, but nutritionally speaking, pizza doesn't love kids.
Can you make a healthier pizza at home that kids will actually eat? After scouring nutrition panels on various ingredients and testing recipes for a couple of days, our answer is: We hope so!
Pizza is pizza - bread, sauce, toppings and lots of cheese. But within those basic categories, the ingredients you choose make all the difference.
After plain cheese pizza, our money is on pepperoni as the most popular pizza choice - but pepperoni is fraught with issues. Ham is a much better option. Turns out the list of healthy trade-offs is a long one.
So while our Mini Ham Pizzas won't look exactly like the pizza older kids and teens might have in mind, they passed our teenage taste tests with raves all around. In an effort to make the healthiest pizza we could, here's our rundown on the ingredient choices.
Crust: A prepared traditional pizza crust has 5 fat grams per serving - 4 grams more than an English muffin. We went with the whole-grain muffin for fiber.
Sauce: Supermarket options are very high in sodium. The only choice was to mix our own. (It's easy and quick!)
Cheese: This is where pizza veers toward killer. In our opinion, mozzarella is an obvious requirement, and, luckily, it's the lesser evil of all the options. Shredded part-skim mozzarella has 6 fat grams per ΒΌ cup (1 ounce), and 3.5 grams of that is saturated. The challenge is holding it to an ounce per serving.
Toppings: Plain cheese or vegetables are best, but if it's meat you crave, resist pepperoni - 14 grams of fat and 510 milligrams sodium per serving. Thinly sliced deli ham has 1 fat gram and 335 milligrams sodium per serving and still adds a lot of flavor.
All in all, today's Mini Ham Pizzas weigh in at 253 calories per serving and just over 7.5 grams of fat. That's 24 percent of calories from fat, and that's as low as we could get.
If you have more ideas on how to cut the fat from pizza (or any other kid favorites!), e-mail us at tellus@kictchenscoop.com. And for another quick pizza recipe, check our new Web site at www.kitchenscoop.com.
Suggested menu: Mini Ham Pizzas with baby carrots with low-fat ranch dip and apple slices.
<div class="infoBox"> <h1>More Coverage</h1> <div class="infoBoxContent"> <div class="infoArea"> <h2>Recipe</h2> <ul class="links"> <li><a href="/story/?id=297888">Mini Ham Pizzas </a></li> </ul> </div> </div> </div>