When my husband was a football coach, we always attended the end of year banquet. Imagine this.....football players and mom's who knew how to feed them. One mother in particular always showed up with the same thing. Calzones. My husband loves calzones. My children love calzones. And this particular mother used homemade bread to make her calzones. Oh. My. Gosh. They are dreamy. I was actually sad when I realized that her son was a senior and we were on our last potluck with her calzones.
After visiting with her, I experimented. I could never duplicate her dough, which was fine. I ended up using frozen bread dough. My people were fine with my calzones. The problem is that it takes all day to thaw out a loaf of frozen bread dough. And I strive to be an advance planner, but alas, am struggling to think ahead.
This summer, I hit on an idea....use my own homemade pizza crust recipe to make my version of calzones. I call them pizza rolls.
If you don't have time to make dough, then you can buy that refrigerator pizza crust and use it. My people like that--it simply takes 3 cans to make them even part way full. It can be expensive to purchase unless you find it on sale.
So here's the basic recipe: pizza crust, cheese, meat of some kind and melted butter. Roll out the crust and sprinkle cheese over it.
Cover with the meat of your choice. This one happens to be leftover chicken (from a whole chicken that I used to make chicken and noodles) and bacon. By the way, if you haven't made bacon in a while because it stinks up your house for days, try this. You will never want to cook bacon any other way.
I am sure that you have noticed that I haven't included any sauce on the pizza roll. We don't love sauce on our stuff, we like to dip our stuff in sauce. In this case, ranch was used to dip the pizza roll in. Kind of like a chicken bacon ranch sandwich from that sandwich place. Only way cheaper.
Roll the dough like you would cinnamon rolls.
It doesn't have to be perfect, just edible. Pinch any holes shut and transfer to a cookie sheet. I did spray my cookie sheets even though I painted the pizza roll with butter before I baked them.
I bake mine at 350 for 20 minutes or more. The pizza roll doesn't seem to get too brown and basically you making sure that the dough cooks all the way through because the ingredients that you add are already cooked.
I have made pizza rolls once a week or more. I made them before I left for Prayer and Action and put them in the freezer. They warm up beautifully.
Yeeks. Whose hand is that? She must be 80.
This summer, I have made many different versions of pizza rolls:
--mozzarella, pepperoni and sausage
--cheddar and beef
--mozzarella, beef and cooked cabbage--mmmm....reminds me of bierocks
--cheddar and pepperoni
--cheddar and sausage
--cheddar, bacon and chicken
Honestly, I think that anything would work for a filling. If your people like it, then it could be made into a pizza roll. We use ranch or spaghetti sauce for dipping.
If you would like to know what my pizza crust recipe is, then keep reading. Otherwise...stop. Go to the next blog.
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Pizza Crust
by The Hays Crew
**this will make one crust
1 cup of water--temp should be around 110 degrees
dissolve 1 tbsp sugar in water and add
2 heaping tsp of yeast--I use bulk yeast--so this may be one of those little packets??
Let yeast 'grow' for around 5 minutes.
3 cups of flour (or a little more)
4 tbsp of melted butter
Put flour in large bowl. Pour butter over flour. Slowly pour yeast mixture over flour. Use a wooden spoon to mix. If dough seems a little sticky, add more flour in 1/4 cup increments until dough is no longer sticky and can be kneaded. Knead for a few minutes and return to bowl. Cover and put in a warm place until doubled in size.
Punch it down. Let it rest 5 minutes and roll out.
Pretty sure this is the way I do it. But it could be a lie and you won't want to follow any of my recipes again. Just sayin'.
