Tuesday, October 6, 2009

October is National Pizza Month - Stromboli



A stromboli isn't exactly a pizza but since it's made up of the exact same ingredients I would think, if nothing else, that they're closely related. Anyway, today's recipe is a mixture of two different recipes. I'm using the dough, layering, and braiding technique found in Chef Ann Martin's recipe, but I'm substituting in a layer of pizza sauce for ham like in Howdini's recipe.

Ingredients
-1 roll of frozen white bread (1 lb)
-1/2 cup of pizza/marinara sauce
-2 cups of mozzarella/pizza cheese
-1 cup of cheddar cheese
-Your favorite toppings


Directions
Step 1 - Grab your favorite cooking sheet, oil it up, and then place your roll of bread on it and oil it up as well.


Step 2 - Cover the bread with either plastic wrap or wax paper and let it sit out for eight or nine hours.


Step 3 - After the dough has expanded to around four or five times its original size, remove its wrapping.


Step 4 - Flatten the dough out into a large rectangle and make sure that it isn't too large to fit on your cooking tray/sheet/stone.


Step 5 - Add a layer of sauce to the dough. You'll want to leave a little bit of room on the edges for later.


Step 6 - Add one cup of mozzarella/pizza cheese.


Step 7 - Add a layer of toppings.


Step 8 - Add one cup of cheddar cheese.


Step 9 - Add an additional layer of toppings.


Step 10 - Add on a final layer of mozzarella/pizza cheese.


Step 11 - The last part of preparing this thing (which is optional) is to braid the dough. I'm not even going to try to explain how this works but if you watch this video you'll get an idea of how to do it.




Step 12 - Set your oven to 350 degrees and bake until golden.



The Verdict
I don't know why I didn't learn my lesson from the last time, but store-bought crust is obviously not the way to go. It gets the job done but it just doesn't have much flavor to it. As far as the actual stromboli itself goes, it was a lot of fun to make but the finished product was just so-so. I'm not a big fan crust to begin with so eating a pizza that was covered entirely in it wasn't exactly great.

Next up, pan pizza!

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