pizza dough two ways

I may have mentioned that the teenagers are eating me out of house and home. Not just my kids, but their friends too. I have been to Costco (my favorite place in the universe for those who know me, I mean I just look at the industrial size mayonnaise and want to dive in) twice in as many weeks. I can’t keep food in my refrigerator or pantry. I go to cook something and the ingredients are gone. Oh, you needed that? Sorry, I was hungry. So in an attempt to load up the snack bins, I got out the stand mixer last week and rocked out some pizza dough.

With my first batch of pizza dough, I made pizza rolls inspired by this recipe from Joy the Baker. Joy’s rolls are nice and big and fluffy because she only made eight rolls out of her ball of dough. I ended up making two dozen rolls (I figured if I made more, I might actually have some to freeze for later), so mine were not quite so fluffy. I also did not use Joy’s dough recipe and honestly have no good reason why I didn’t give it a try. You should do that. Let me know how it goes. It sure looks amazing.

This recipe is genius. I made my dough using the dough hook on my stand mixer. No kneading required. I divided the dough in two and rolled each separately for fear that I would break the big roll.

I used pomi strained tomatoes, turkey pepperoni, and pre-grated mozzarella (cheater but let’s be honest, I was making these for teens and do you really think they were going to notice the quality of the mozzarella?) for filling.

I ran out of mozzarella part of the way through so added some goat cheese to the second roll-up. The kids judged this to be a little odd but ate the pizza rolls anyway. While I ended up baking 24 rolls, I only have seven left in my freezer less than a week later. I think I initially froze ten? The rest were eaten before I even got out the freezer bags. Oh, and do yourself a favor and grease your pans REALLY well. Trust me.

I made a second batch of pizza dough (same recipe) and gave Mario Batali’s pizza dough cinnamon rolls a try. Now this recipe was a bit puzzling to me. First, it called for a half pound of pizza dough. I got out my scale and my dough ball weighed nearly two pounds. This meant that I would need two sticks of butter and two cups of sugar. What? No way. I settled on one stick of butter, a little less than a cup of sugar, and two tablespoons of cinnamon. This was plenty. The second oddity of this recipe was that it called for a “small cake pan” but the photo looks like it was made in a lasagna pan. I figured since I had nearly quadruple the dough, a nice 9x13 pan would work just fine.

Ok, so this is a messy recipe.

Melted butter in pools everywhere.

Piles of sticky cinnamon and sugar.

It’s all good though. These are simple and tasty. I didn’t even make the frosting because the kids (and their posse) demolished them while I was letting them cool (and possibly watching the World Cup). I promise to make this recipe again, this time with the frosting. That way, I might actually get to taste one.