Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Pizza Crust and Bread Sticks

If you know me personally you know I absolutely despise cooking with yeast. I am simply cursed when it comes to the dang stuff. Banana bread, applesauce bread, carrot bread, pumpkin bread,....all of which I can bake to my hearts content and receive endless compliments, but yeast breads--these are were I fail miserably.
I was searching for something to compliment my BBQ chicken and potatoes tonight for dinner and came across BBQ chicken pizza--oh how I LOVE BBQ chicken pizza! But OH how I hate making homemade pizza dough because it always includes that single dreaded recipe--yeast. Do you see my dilemma?
After browsing recipes for 20 minutes, I decided to alter and take a recipe head-on. Homemade bread sticks sounded too scrumptious to miss out on and I could toss a small pizza together for the children just in case they do not care for the BBQ chicken and potatoes.

Here's the recipe with the review to come later.
I combined the dry ingredients with my Kitchen aid Mixer

3 c. flour (any kind)
1 TB white sugar
1 pkg of dry active yeast
As the mixer was "stirring" I added
1 c. warm water (straight from faucet)
2 TB. safflower oil

Once the ingredients started to form a ball, I pulled them from the mixer and divided into two balls.
Setting the first ball aside I focused on my elementary school years of play-dough snakes. Yes, I rolled the second ball into an extra long "snake" and sliced into 6 pieces to make bread sticks. I put a nickle size drop of olive oil in my hand, rubbed each bread stick and lined on 1/2 of a cookie sheet.
Back to the first ball. With oil still on my hands I pressed it flat onto the other 1/2 of the cookie sheet. Followed with 365 Roasted Veggie Tomato Sauce and a couple handfuls of Kirkland Mexican Cheese.
After washing my hands, I sprinkled some garlic salt and parsley on the bread sticks.

Now the oven is pre-heated to 375 (or 350 convection) and the bread sticks and pizza are cooking for 20-25 minutes. I'll write a review after we eat dinner tonight!

As promised--the review...

Overall, extremely easy and quick recipe. I love the fact that there is no "rising" required. Definitely will use it again.

Changes to make...Instead of putting olive oil under the dough to keep it from sticking I will either use a pizza stone or sprinkle down some corn meal. The dough wasn't soggy, but I like my pizza extra flakey and crispy and I think that may help some. It turned out tasting like Pizza Huts' crust, but with the same consistancy of a thin layer pizza.

Flavor was amazing--two thumbs up.

The bread sticks turned out really well too! I may let them rise for 30 mins or so before cooking next time to make them a little fluffier, but they were still delish.

Keira says, "Mom this is GREAT! YUM!"

Tyler didn't say much since his mouth was full when I asked him--always a good sign w/ the little man.

No comments:

Post a Comment