The Low-Calorie Pizza Recipe You've Been Searching For

Want to hear perhaps the most delectable eight words ever spoken about a pizza? "You can eat the whole thing without guilt."

In fact, what chef and food writer Tynia Peay of On Ty's Plate said in full was: "You can eat the whole thing without guilt because it's under 400 calories!" That's right, an entire personal-sized pizza complete with sauce, cheese, and four toppings that you can enjoy in full without a side dish of guilt. In fact, better yet, Peay says the pizza "can be paired with a simple garden salad and a tasty vinaigrette for a filling meal."

This light, healthy pizza will take you all of five minutes to prepare and cooks up in about ten minutes, so it's perfect for a quick lunch, simple dinner, or when you need a serious snack. And on the off chance of leftovers, which Peay says store well "in the fridge using a Ziploc bag or any other airtight container," the pizza "reheats well in a preheated oven [in just] four to six minutes."

Do take note that in preparing this recipe, Peay "used a kitchen scale to measure the weight of the vegetables along with fatsecret.com for the nutrition facts" so your pizza may come out a bit above (or below) that 400 calorie threshold, but as long as you follow the recipe with decent fidelity, you can count on a meal that's small on calorie count but big on flavor.

This is pizza, so of course there's some flexibility with the toppings. When it comes to the bread, you can pick your preferred brand, but to keep the calories low, keep it with lavash. Peay says: "I'm using Joseph's flax, oat bran, and whole wheat lavash flatbread. It is high in fiber with low net carbs (6 grams) per serving," so that's another benefit. 

Her recipe calls for one Joseph's lavash bread (a 9- by 12-inch piece), a quarter cup of pizza sauce, one ounce of part skim mozzarella shreds, two ounces of uncured smoked deli ham, one cup of spinach leaves, six thin red onion slices, and four thin green bell pepper slices.

To start things off with this low-calorie pizza recipe, preheat your oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Now place the lavash bread on a baking sheet and use a spoon (or a finger, if you're prepping pizza just for you) to spread the pizza sauce out evenly on the bread. You can go ahead and spread the sauce all the way to the edges, there won't be a traditional crust here.

Next, lay the spinach evenly out onto the sauce-coated bread. Try not to let leaves lie atop one another.

Follow with the spinach with the deli ham, the thin sliced red onion, the thin sliced green pepper, and then the cheese. You want to lay out the toppings so they are minimally piled up, giving each individual topping its own space as much as possible. This will result in a more stable pizza, will prevent sogginess, and it spreads the love around (aka the flavor).

Now bake the low-calorie pizza for eight to ten minutes, until all the cheese has melted. And yep, that's it. Enjoy. Enjoy all of it!