Adventures with bread dough...

I haven't been posting much, but I did try something new last week and then our internet service became very, very spotty--so spotty, that, for example, I was able to post a comment that someone left, and then unable to post a reply. Hopefully the service will hold up for the duration of this post. Ah, the suspense of it... :)

Anyway, not too long ago I was at a youth activity where they were making "pizza bombs". Basically, they took bread dough that originally looked like rolls, flattened it, spread pizza sauce, added toppings like cheese and pepperoni, and took a second flattened piece of dough to cover it. Then they pinched the edges of the dough together to hold the toppings in, and marked their individual pizza bombs with food coloring so that they would know whose was whose once they emerged from the oven. They turned out well. I asked the person who supplied the dough if it was homemade, and was told that it was Rhodes dough. So I wondered if I could do pizza bombs with my homemade rolls....

Well, the pizza bomb experience took place before Thanksgiving, and at Thanksgiving, I made the roll recipe I now usually use (this one) and asked my best source (Mom) what she thought of using it to make the aforementioned recipe. She pretty much indicated that it would be better if I used a more basic recipe, since those rolls are pretty dense, so I mentioned I might use the bread loaf recipe I usually use, (this one) and let it rise into the loaf, only to tear it apart when it was done rising and make it into a tasty pizza delight....

And that's what I did. As a matter of fact, when I was in the middle of constructing the pizza bombs, I told my husband that I should be taking pictures for this blog...but he was helping and I had spaghetti sauce (our mini pizza sauce of choice) on my hands, and then we were eating them, and then they were gone...and then there was nothing to take a picture of, and so it goes. Sorry. But I will comment on how this experiment went....

---The pizza bombs were a success and were labeled a "keeper", which means that the likelihood that they will be made again is very high.

---Although the dough seemed pretty thin when rolled out and painstakingly pinched together, when it was baked until brown, it was pretty dense. This made it really filling, but so much density kind of made the toppings harder to find.

---Even though I was careful pinching the edges together, there were still at least some cases where the fillings made their way out of the bombs before they were removed from the oven. They still tasted good though, and took less time to bake than the loaf form would have at the same temperature....

Now I will probably try to come up with new fillings so that we can make different kinds of "bombs" in the future. Spaghetti sauce stores easily, as do olives, which we also used. It didn't take much cheese or pepperoni per bomb, and so there are few ingredients to use, and as mentioned, the bread part of it made it filling. I don't consider pepperoni to be a long-term storage item, so it's back to the drawing board to make a more food storage friendly recipe, but variety with your basic bread dough has to be a good thing, right? Maybe something with canned chicken or Spam would work out when I try this again... :)