Pizza Rolls... how to with pictures :)

Yum!

A local pizza place has these wonderful things call peperoni rolls. They even have a special night when they are only 50 cents each. Sounds like a great deal, huh? Well, it is... for eating out. But not for penny-pinchin-I-can-make-that-(almost)-from-scratch-for-less people like me! The cost per roll for mine are about 22 cents.

And honestly, I had the idea of making pizza pocket type contraptions to stash away in our freezer for quick lunches for Steven or for dinner-on-the-go-kind-of-nights. However, I've found that these are easier for me to make and a lot less messy to eat than pizza pockets (you don't really need a plate with these). I'm thinking we are for sure going to fill our freezer with these when we have our next baby.

I looked and looked online for a tutorial on how to wrap these suckers up... but the best one I found was this video (don't ask me how I found it). I did a couple of things differently than he did but in general (aside from the weirdness that is a vegan zombie) I think it's a pretty good tutorial.



Here is what you'll need...
Dough (I use artisan bread dough)
Extra flour for dusting
Some kind of sauce
A touch of water
Olive Oil
Cheese
Toppings (pepperoni, spinach, onion, chicken, etc)



Here's how to put them together...

Get you're dough out on a well floured surface.



And Roll it out like you are making a pizza.

I learned a little bit since I took these pictures and you don't want to roll the dough out too thin or the cheese will leak out. I've made them (several times) since this picture and have rolled the dough out a little thicker (roughly 3/8"... that's somewhere between 1/4" & 1/2") and it works much better. Sometimes cheese escapes, but most of the time it holds it all in.



Next Cut the pizza dough into slices

I was experimenting in these pictures. The optimum number of slices is 8! If you do 12 (like I did on the right) they come out too small. 8 is great. One pizza feeds our entire family for one meal... 4.5 pizza rolls for Steven, 2.5 for me, 1 for John. But make a second pizza so you will have left overs for the next day.



And then put on the toppings. Keep all the toppings in the wide section of the pizza slice. And keep all messy ingredients far away from little helpers... he kept bugging me for pepperoni slices.



Next, the tricky part. The roll!

So if you look at the bottom of the picture and work your way up you can see the stages.

The arrows are my attempts at making these pictures better. I've found that it's best to take the two flaps, in the very bottom slice, and bring them ALL the way over the toppings. Then press them down firmly (sealing it and preventing cheese escapes). Then start to roll. As I roll I like to seal the edges whenever I feel like there might be a spot where cheese will escape. It's not really as hard as I'm making it out to be... and if your cheese escapes you can just peel if off the cookie sheet and feed it to your cheese loving husband.



Then take some marinara and water it down a bit. Add some oil and whisk till it's all combined. Then paint over the pizza rolls on the baking sheet. I set mine on parchment because I put everything on parchment... I don't think I turn on the oven if I don't have parchment in the house.



The next batch I made was spinach. You can brush the top with olive oil and put a spinach leaf on it (or an our case a spinach leaf and a piece of cheese because I had to keep the plain spinach separate for John because he couldn't have dairy yet)... really just some way of identifying it so that you don't have to cut it open to figure out what is inside.



Like I said, they were a big hit and we have pretty much made them once a week since I took these pictures. You just can't beat feeding a small family of 3 for under $2!