Thursday, April 19, 2012

Pizzarific Pull Apart Bread

I was a hold out and then this week I gave in to Pinterest. My biggest concern was that it would be a total time suck, my next was that would never have a good idea of my own ever again. Like Facebook I couldn't resist forever, so I'm now a member of the pinterest community and exploring what pinning means to the masses. I found this and thought, "nummy I must make!" But of course it needs my own spin. My favorite pizza comes from a little place in Anchorage known as Moose's Tooth. They have the best whole wheat crust and bread sticks and this pizza called The Backpacker. The Backpacker is pizza meant for veggie lovers. Don't get me wrong I love me some meat, but this pizza is delish; spinach, sun dried tomatoes, cloves of roasted garlic, artichoke hearts, olives, and chunks of feta, with an oil based sauce. Very Italian! When I crave pizza this is where my memory goes and my mouth waters. It's like home! So my pull apart bread is going to reflect this gourmet pizza.

Starting with my bread. The original poster used canned (gasp) dough. I have  a recipe I pilfered that I use most of the time to make pizza dough. We have homemade pizza regularly and this is my go to crust, so we're going to use this. I will say that I use honey instead of sugar and usually it's of the raw local variety. For this recipe I mixed some pizza seasoning into the dough when adding the flour. Adding Italian seasoning or the herbs included in these seasonings would have the same affect, which is flavor throughout your bread.

Entering the assembly stage I discovered we were out of olives and feta. *pout*

Once the dough had risen I rolled it into little 1" balls. I placed the little balls into a pan that i lightly coated with olive oil and sprinkled sun dried tomatoes, fresh spinach, mozzarella cheese, roasted garlic, and chopped artichoke hearts throughout. It's layering and alternating and making sure it's all placed evenly. Before going into the oven it looked like this:


I baked at 350 for about 30 minutes. I originally did 20 and eldest child took it out of the oven. The picture below reflects that 20 minute doneness. You can see it had to go back in to reach golden brown, but my vultures, urm, children pounced before I could get another picture.


I consider it a success if it gets inhaled and this did. I look forward to playing with the fixings. We love BBQ pizza and Hawaiian and sausage etc, so I foresee lots of combinations.



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