Cauliflower Pizza Bite UPDATE

Sue and I have been getting a lot of views and comments on our Cauliflower Pizza Bites that we blogged about a little while back.

A lot.

Like tens of thousands of views. True story. (Holy heck, right?)

We also got a lot of comments on our dilemma of the bites sticking to our non-stick pans. It was really nice that so many people commented with ideas on how to solve the problem.

Sue and I decided to do an update and try a few of the suggestions.

I didn't have any turkey pepperoni so I had to use some mini ham pepperoni as a substitute, other than that the recipe was made exactly the same way as originally.

These are the 5 suggestions we chose to try:

1. Plain pans sprayed with cooking spray. 2. Paper liners sprayed with cooking spray. 3. Plain paper liners.

4. Using a small cookie scoop and dropping onto tinfoil sprayed with cooking spray.

5. Using a small cookie scoop and dropping onto parchment paper.

Here is what we found out.

1. (Plain pan with cooking spray) This is what we used in our original post that gave us the clean up issues. The bites still pop out after running a knife around the edge but you will still be left scrubbing the pan afterward.

2. (Paper liner sprayed with cooking spray) Worked really well. It popped out of the pan no problem and peeled off the bite without tearing. It was slightly "greasy" from the spray in the paper.

3. (Plain paper liner) Worked really well. Popped out of the pan and paper peeled off without any troubles. (I was surprised, I really thought it would stick!)

The paper liners worked great HOWEVER the bottoms of the bites are still a tiny bit "gummy" and required a few minutes, upside down, under the broiler to crisp up.

4. (Tinfoil with cooking spray) This worked okay. It was fairly stuck to the tinfoil, even though it was sprayed well. The bites spread out as they cooked so were quite thin. I had to work a little bit to get them to release from the tinfoil BUT still less work than scrubbing the muffin tins.

5. (Parchment paper) This worked really well. It released easily from the paper, the bottoms were nicely browned, and they only spread a tiny bit.

See. They all ended with similar looking results. The 6 on the left were the parchment paper, the 6 in the middle, on top, were the sprayed muffin tins, the 5 on the right were on the tinfoil, the 3, vertical, on the bottom right were the plain paper liners, and the 3, horizontal, on the left were the sprayed paper liners.

The cooking methods all yield basically the same results in terms of looks but Sue and I agreed that the parchment paper was BY FAR the one that worked the best - ie: least amount of work.

If we had to rate the methods it would be like this:

1. Parchment paper - no clean up, even crispiness

2. Plain paper liners - hardly any clean up, just need to broil bottoms to crisp up

3. Tinfoil, sprayed - no clean up, even crispiness, just a little tough to get off the foil

4. Paper liners, sprayed - hardly any clean up, need to broil to crisp up bottoms, a little soggy from spray.

5. Plain pans, sprayed - tough clean up, need to broil to crisp up bottoms

Thanks again to all of you who offered suggestions. We still haven't tried the silicone pans as we didn't have access to them. Knowing how well the parchment paper and cookie scoop works, I think we will use that as our tried and true method.

These are so good dipped in spaghetti sauce they have become one of my favorite late night snacks. They freeze well too! I just take out a few, pop them in the toaster oven, and they are good to go.

Tasty and healthy!