I lifted the lid on the cardboard box containing my raw food pizza to take a peek.

The young woman behind the desk at Nourish, the health shop at Dean Street Arcade, joined me, and we silently stood looking at the array of avocado pear, caramelised onion, mushroom, sprouts and what looked like cream, but I had been assured was actually cashew nut cheese.

She pointed to my son and whispered 'Is he going to eat this?'. I shrugged. I couldn't get my four-year old to eat a normal pizza, nevermind this affair. I assured her, my mouth already watering at the prospect of tasting what was infront of me, that I hadn't sampled the fare yet either. 'I'm just helping out' she smiled, 'and I hadn't seen one of them before'...

The two of us were drooling over a raw food pizza produced by Natalie and Noel of earthshine. Encased in the box was a pizza that was 100% gluten and dairy free, 100% raw and healthy.

We haven't eaten a pizza for a long time. It had reached the stage where the effects the following morning just weren't worth the indulgence. And invariably the indulgence in over-refined wheat and a whole lot of cheap cheese tipped the scales and one of us would come down with a cold.

One bite of this raw pizza, and I was hooked.

The base is made from buckwheat. Sprouted buckwheat to be precise. These are ground together with flax seeds, a mixture of tomatoes, onion and seasonings and then dried in a dhydrator overnight. The result is a crisp almost biscuity base that is super filling and makes a perfect foundation for the toppings.

When combined with the avocado, the onion, marinated mushrooms and cashew nut cheese, the effect was simply delicious! It tasted nothing like pizza, and yet, when trying to describe it between mouthfuls, the closest food I could come up with was - pizza.

When I phoned Natalie to place an order, she assured me that one pizza would feed our family. In reality it more than fed three of us. There were left overs. We had it for lunch on Saturday too. The most I could manage in one sitting was two pieces, and the meal was not only wonderfully tasty, but left me feeling excited by how good raw food can taste.

You can order a pizza to go from Natalie for Friday (they offer one pizza variety each week with local and seasonal toppings). They cost R120 each (very reasonable I thought, considering the time and the amount of food involved).

To quote earthshine 'these are nutritionally dense foods and will feed more mouths than the conventional dough'n'cheese version, around 2 to 3 adults per pizza.' They are made using mainly certified organic ingredients.

Place your order by 5pm on Thursday and you can collect on Friday from:

Nourish in Newlands
Green Living, Hout Bay
Pinelands
Soaring Free Superfoods, Tokai
Scarborough by arrangement
Somerset West

natalie[at]earthshine[dot]co[dot]za
or see the raw pizza page on Facebook