Pepperoni Pinwheels

Pepperoni pizza in a fun, bite-size, dippable form that makes eating it so much more fun! These homemade pepperoni pinwheels with melted mozzarella will be a hit with the pizza lovers in your life. (And who doesn’t love pizza?)

There’s a bit of a story behind this recipe … and it starts with my Wednesday yoga group. We’ve been doing yoga together every Wednesday night for over 7 years now, and every Wednesday after yoga, we go out for wine. We call it Wino Wednesday. It all started when I asked Sue, one of the ladies who did yoga with me, if she would like to go across the street to the little neighborhood bar for a drink afterwards. We joked about it for several weeks before we decided to actually DO it. We discovered that they had “Wino Wednesday” specials every Wednesday. There wasn’t much of a selection of wine, but it was still fun. Once we’d tried it, it became a thing we did every Wednesday night after yoga, just the two of us, and we became good friends. Eventually the TaeKwonDo studio where we were doing yoga stopped offering yoga and we were forced to look elsewhere for yoga classes. We tried several places before we settled on a new yoga “home”. We kept the tradition of going out for wine after yoga alive, but at a different bar that was located in the same plaza as the new yoga studio. It was there that our little group of two grew to eight. We kept that tradition until that yoga studio closed down and then we were seriously distraught … where were we going to have our Wednesday night yoga?

My friend Sue (who started this whole tradition with me) also happens to own a furniture store, so we decided to do yoga at her furniture store for the time being until we found a new yoga “home” … and of course we kept the Wino Wednesday tradition going, traveling back to the bar we used to frequent and then trying some new spots and eventually settling at the Hy-Vee Market Grille. I was really opposed to the idea when it first came up. (Drinking wine at a grocery store was NOT high on my list.) But since they had half price bottles of wine (and sushi) on Wednesdays, I agreed to give it a try. It was really fun! Ordering a few bottles of wine with my friends and sharing them amongst us made me feel even closer to my already close-knit circle of friends. It was also nice that we didn’t ALL have to purchase wine each week. Some weeks you would buy wine, some weeks you just drank for free. What’s better than that?

This tradition has been going on for quite a while … we still do yoga at the furniture store … and now we are on a first-name basis with the waitress at Hy-Vee, who’s super sweet and waits for us to show up every Wednesday. Sometimes my son likes to tag along, chill out at the furniture store while we’re doing yoga and then go out with us afterwards. He is old enough to drink now, but he never drinks the wine … just orders a soda and a little something to eat from the menu. His favorite thing on the menu to order is pepperoni pinwheels. The first time he ordered them, I remember saying “I could make those at home!” and my friends joked about it (because, yeah, I AM a food blogger … I ought to be able to handle this simple recipe). Being very versed in yeasted breads of all sorts, I didn’t even bother looking for a recipe the first time I tried making pepperoni pinwheels. The results of my overconfidence on the first try humbled me. Each “pinwheel” was a big puff of dough with a tiny bit of pepperoni. It was really NOT the nice balance of crust, cheese and pepperoni that I was striving for.

A long time went by (like years) before I thought of trying to make pepperoni pinwheels again. A few weeks ago, my son decided to tag along on my Wednesday yoga outing and he ordered the Pepperoni Pinwheels again but this time they weren’t as good. He still ate them and seemed quite pleased with them … but the lack of consistency triggered a fierce determination inside of me to master these babies at home. THIS time I looked at recipes online. It was hard to find a recipe that didn’t use refrigerated crescent rolls (although if you don’t mind the preservatives in pre-made crescent rolls, you can certainly go that route) … but I found a few and noticed a theme: they all prepped the “rolls” by rolling out pizza dough, topped with mozzarella and pepperoni and then wrapped in plastic wrap and refrigerated them. AHA! The refrigeration would keep the pepperoni pinwheels from puffing up so much and provide the perfect balance of crust, pepperoni and cheese.

The other advantage to doing it this way is you can keep the rolled up dough in the fridge for a few days and cook up fresh hot pepperoni pinwheels in just a few minutes, whenever you so desire. You can also freeze the rolls and then thaw and cook them later. Brilliant!

My son insisted on buying some premium pepperoni for the pizza rolls and (with the premium pepperoni), my daughter is now a pepperoni pinwheel convert. Total win! And since I control the ingredients in the dough and the toppings, I feel so much better about feeding my kids these fun little pinwheels than the crappy frozen pizzas we tend to lean on when we need a quick dinner for the kids.

And it all started when one night one of my yoga friends and I decided to go out for a glass of wine … I’m thinking of bringing these yummies to our yoga Christmas party this year, but I’ll have to make a vegetarian version as well, since a couple of our Wino Wednesday group are vegetarians.

Note: some recipes I saw put sauce on the dough before the pepperoni. I thought this might be a good idea, so I tried it. My kids and I all sampled the results and decided it’s best to keep the sauce on the side, for dipping. I don’t know why it is, but the pepperoni pinwheels are really best with just pepperoni and cheese inside the rolls.

Pepperoni Pinwheels

• Prep Time: 30 minutes
• Cook Time: 15 minutes
• Total Time: 1 hour 15 minutes
• Yield: 6 - 8 servings 1x

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Ingredients

Scale 1x2x3x

• 1 batch of pizza dough (I used my Italian Garlic Pizza Crust – recipe here … or you can use store-bought dough)
• About 1 to 1 1/2 lb. mozzarella cheese
• About 1/2 lb. thin-sliced pepperoni
• Marinara sauce, for dipping, warmed

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Instructions

1. Make (or thaw) the pizza dough, let it rise, then cut the dough in half. On a floured surface using a rolling pin, roll one half of the dough into a long skinny rectangle about 10 inches wide and as long as it wants to be, rolling the dough as thin as you possibly can. You want the dough to be REALLY thin, so if the dough is resisting you and springing back, pause in the midst of rolling for about 5 minutes, covering the dough with a towel, and then try rolling it a little thinner.
2. Sprinkle the dough lightly with shredded mozzarella. Add thin pepperoni slices scattered about over the crust (or for a more intense pepperoni taste, cover the surface mostly with pepperoni), leaving a little edge on the side nearest you, then top with a more generous amount of mozzarella.
3. Starting on the long edge furthest from you, bring up a bit of the dough to cover the long edge of the dough, then start rolling the dough in and over towards you, rolling it up, jelly roll style and gently pushing the bottom underneath to let the pepperoni and cheese roll up into the roll (rather than getting shifted outwards).
4. Wet the long edge of the dough nearest you with water, then stretch that layer up and wrap it around the “log”, pressing gently to seal. Tuck the ends of the log in and press the dough on the edges together with your fingers so they don’t “leak” cheese or pepperoni.
5. Set the roll on plastic wrap and wrap it up so it’s fully wrapped, leaving a little bit extra wrap at the ends so you can fold them over to fully enclose the rolls. Put the roll in the fridge for at least 30 minutes or up to 2 days. (Best if used or frozen within a day.)
6. When it’s almost time to eat, preheat the oven to 400 F. Spray a baking sheet with cooking spray or brush with oil. Cut the rolls into 1 inch slices using a knife or (unflavored) dental floss. Set each roll on the prepared sheet, cut side down, leaving a little space in between the rolls. Don’t worry if there are some air gaps inside the rolls–they’ll fill in as they cook. If any of the pinwheels gets “squished” in the cutting process, gently shape it back into a circular shape. Sprinkle any escaped mozzarella cheese on top of the pinwheels.
7. Bake for 12 – 15 minutes or until the pepperoni pinwheels are golden brown and the cheese is fully melted and a little browned on top. Serve with warm marinara sauce.

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Notes

RECIPE SOURCE: http://www.sumptuousspoonfuls.com/

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