Pizza rolls — made with pizza dough
Pizza rolls are the after-school classic rescued from the freezer aisle: little pillows of the same pizza dough wrapped around sauce, cheese and pepperoni, baked until golden and molten. Made at home they're bigger, cheesier, and not faintly of cardboard.
Say how many you want and the page weighs the dough for the batch — the calculator's own engine, pointed at a couple dozen little parcels instead of one big pie. The filling is yours to argue about; sealing them shut is the only rule that matters.
How much dough
For 20 rolls, on New York dough — 25 g of dough a roll:
| Ingredient | Baker's % | For 20 rolls |
|---|---|---|
| Flour | 100% | 295 g |
| Water | 63% | 186 g |
| Salt | 2.5% | 7.4 g |
| Olive oil | 2.5% | 7.4 g |
| Sugar | 1.5% | 4.4 g |
| Yeast | 0.23% | 0.7 g |
Making more or fewer? The dough scales straight off the count:
| Rolls | Total dough | Flour |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | 250 g | 147 g |
| 20 | 500 g | 295 g |
| 30 | 750 g | 442 g |
| 40 | 1000 g | 589 g |
The yeast is weighed for an example 8 h rise at 21 °C — set your real schedule in the calculator and it reweighs the pinch.
What else you’ll need
Beyond the dough — for 20 rolls:
- 150 g low-moisture mozzarella, diced small
- 100 g pizza sauce, plus more for dipping
- 60 g pepperoni, chopped (or cooked sausage, or just more cheese)
- 1 egg, beaten, for the wash
- grated Parmigiano and dried oregano, to finish
How it’s done
- Make the dough: 20 × 25 g pieces of New York dough — 295 g flour, 186 g water, 7.4 g salt and the yeast, weighed by the calculator for your schedule. (Leftover pizza dough works too.)
- Roll the dough out thin, about 3 mm, and cut it into squares roughly 7 cm across.
- Put a little mozzarella, a dab of sauce and a few pieces of pepperoni just off-centre of each square — don't overfill, or they'll burst in the oven.
- Fold each square corner-to-corner into a triangle (or roll it into a little log) and press the edges hard with a fork to seal; a weak seal is a blown roll.
- Set on a lined tray, brush with egg wash, and scatter with Parmigiano and oregano.
- Bake at 220 °C / 430 °F for 13–16 minutes, until golden and crisp. Serve hot, with warm sauce for dipping.
Questions from the counter
What's the difference between a pizza roll and a calzone?
Scale, mostly — both are sealed dough around a pizza filling, but a pizza roll is a two-bite snack and a calzone is a meal. The dough and the sealing trick are the same, so if you want the big version there's a weighed calzone here too.
Should I bake them or deep-fry them?
Baking is easier and what the times above assume; deep-frying at 180 °C / 355 °F for a couple of minutes gets you closer to the crisp, blistered shell of the frozen kind. Either way the seal has to be tight, or the cheese escapes into the oil or onto the tray.
How do I stop them leaking or bursting?
Three things: don't overfill, keep the filling fairly dry (drain wet sauce), and crimp the edges firmly with a fork. Leaving a clear border and pressing out the air before you seal does most of the work; a tiny steam vent on baked ones helps too.
Can I make a batch ahead and freeze them?
That's the whole point — shape and seal them, freeze on a tray, then bag them up. Bake straight from frozen, adding a few minutes. It's the freezer-aisle move done properly, with cheese you can actually name.
Get the dough
The New York preset weighs the batch and writes the schedule — mix, rise, shape, bake. Pizza rolls is what you do with it.
The clock is a suggestion. The dough is the boss. In bocca al lupo!