A Failed Stuffed Crust

I love pizza. I don’t just love eating it, I love making pizza as well. Over the years, I’ve discovered that pizza dough is relatively easy to make, you just have to knead it good and proper. However, there’s only so much pizza one can eat before getting bored. This is why I attempted to make a stuffed crust pizza. Just to make a change.

Well, it didn’t really work. And my stuffed crust pizza didn’t look nearly as nice as the one pictured above.

So where did I go wrong?

I have several ideas. The very first being what I was stuffing into the crust of my pizza. For some insane reason, I didn’t go for the traditional option of cheese. Any sort of cheese. Either something that melts or is already somewhat fluid like cream cheese. Instead, I went for hotdogs. Whole hot dogs that I didn’t chop up. These must have expanded while cooking, because they easily broke through the dough I used to cover them up. I didn’t even use anything to ‘stick’ the hot dogs down, I was kinda expecting that it would work like a sausage roll.

The other mistake I made was using thick dough. I like my pizzas to be quite deep. This however meant that the crust was much thicker than it should have been, and because it was so thick, the edges ended up rising and coming unglued. So the hot dogs found themselves bursting out completely. The dough also rose partially when baking, making the gaps worse. But even if I had managed to properly seal the stuffed crust, it would have been way too thick to eat anyway.

The last mistake I made was too many toppings, but I think that’s just personal preference. There’s only so much cheese you can put on a pizza, before it all falls off after the first bite. But the cheese also didn’t go great with the hot dog either.

What would I do next time?

I’m not normally a person to give up on things, especially pizza. It’s most likely that I’ll attempt another stuffed crust in the future. So what do I recommend? Well, firstly, I’d recommend making your pizza much, much thinner. Something which I should do, because thinner pizzas are better for you. Because of the stuffing, the dough on the outside needs to be a lot thicker, for it not to be an inedible, crusty, overly bready mess.

But secondly and more importantly, I should just stick to cheese as filler. It melts down nicely and gives you even more of that stringy cheese action. Hot dogs weren’t a good idea. Actually, I say that, the hotdogs may have worked if I’d added some cheese, or cut the hotdogs to be smaller and thinner. Perhaps a sauce would have worked better with the hotdogs, like ketchup or something. Cheese stuffing though wouldn’t have this problem.

Either way, next time I make a stuffed crust pizza, I’ll take more caution and do it properly.