Scalloped Pizza Bites

♫ Listening to: Another Day by Carousel ♫

This recipe makes 1 pizza crust. I usually double it and make 2 pizzas for my family of four so we can have leftovers for lunches. Today, I’m trying something different/slightly embarrassing, so I didn’t double it.

Pizza Dough Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon yeast (or 1 envelope/package)
• 1 cup warm water
• 1 teaspoon raw sugar
• 2 cups flour
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon garlic powder
• 2 tablespoons nutritional yeast

Pizza Dough Directions

Mix the yeast, water*, and sugar in large bowl. Add 1 ½ cups of the flour. Mix well to blend.

Add the oil, salt, garlic, and nutritional yeast and stir well.

Add the remaining flour and stir well.

Place the dough onto a flour covered board. Dust your hands with flour.

Knead for 5 minutes, adding flour if it gets too sticky.

Skip both of those last 2 steps if you’re lazy like me, and have a kitchenaid to do your dirty work for you. While some people really enjoy the task of kneading bread dough, I prefer to save my valuable energy for more important things like playing Joust. Speaking of which…is it break time? Okay, I’m back. I usually know that it’s kneaded enough when it all starts to stick into a ball and clings to the dough hook.

Form a ball with the dough and place it into a lightly oiled bowl. Cover bowl with a kitchen towel and set in a warm place for 45 minutes to an hour. Maybe the dough likes to play hide and seek before you bake it or maybe you don’t want it to dry out while it’s rising. I’m 85% sure it’s one of those 2 reasons.

Here’s the part in the choose your own adventure book where you must make an important decision that could affect the rest of the book. Are you going to make a traditional pizza or are you going to be a huge nerd (and I cannot believe I’m admitting to this on the world wide web) and make a pampered chef tube pizza crust? If you chose the first option, continue reading from this point. If you chose the second option, skip to the row of stars and continue reading there.

Preheat oven to 500º.

Knead the dough once again.

Roll the dough into the shape of pizza you would like using a rolling pin, and place onto a baking stone.

Top with sauce and toppings.

Bake 10-15 minutes.

Remove from oven and let cool.

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Preheat oven to 375º.

Coat the inside of your bread tube with some sort of oil. Have you seen the shape of one of these puppies? They don’t exactly look like the type of thing you can easily coat with the olive oil and a paper towel method.

The pampered chef broads probably wanted me to use Pam to spray the inside of this bread tube, but luckily, I have the hippie version of Pam: Spectrum coconut oil spray. This stuff is great for hard to reach places that need to be greased. I highly recommend getting some if you don’t already have it.

Separate the dough in half (you only need 12 ounces of pizza dough for the bread tube). Get out your scale, change the switch from grams to ounces (because your European boyfriend uses it for measuring the exact amount of coffee and water to use in the chemex every morning), and plop what looks like half the dough onto the scale. Add or subtract until you get 12 ounces.

Roll the pizza dough into a log shape and drop it into the tube.

Bake for 1 hour, and then place on a cooling rack. The hilarious part is that the instructions that came with this device tell you to always bake this thing vertically. I had to do some oven rack rearranging to make room for it, and it barely fit even after all that. So weird!

Remove from bread tube once cool and slice.

Arrange the slices on a baking stone and top with a dollop of pizza sauce.

Add toppings.

Bake at 500º for 10-15 minutes.

*The water should be around 100-110º. I’m lucky that I have a kettle that tells me the temperature of the water, but before that, I used to just estimate. I never bring food into bathrooms with me. I don’t even like to bring my water bottle into the bathroom with me. So, it’s almost difficult for me to type this sentence, but basically you want the water to be around the same temperature as bathwater. Clean bathwater. The cleanest bathwater.