Gluten Free Pigs In A Blanket: A REVIEW

About a year ago, our family made a change.  We went gluten free.  We are not Celiac, but we found increased improvement in our overall health by giving up gluten.

My family misses 'junk food' greatly.  So when I get time, I experiment with recipes I find on the internet.  Some of them are fantastic, others - not so much.

Tonight's dinner was one such experiment.  The recipe is below (and can be found here), then my review will follow...

Ingredients

2 cups (280 g) high-quality all-purpose gluten-free flour
1 1/2 teaspoons xanthan gum (omit if your blend already contains it)
1 tablespoon active dry yeast
1 teaspoon (4 g) sugar
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
3/4 cup (6 fl. oz.) warm water (about 100°F)
3 tablespoons (63 g) extra-virgin olive oil (plus an extra tablespoon for drizzling)
16 gluten-free cocktail weenies (about 8 ounces)

Directions 

Make the pizza dough. In a medium-size bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer, place the flour, xanthan gum, yeast, sugar, and salt and whisk to combine well. To the flour mixture, add the 3 tablespoons of olive oil and the water in a steady stream, mix with a spoon or fork to combine, or mix with the paddle attachment of your stand mixer on low speed. Stir or mix constantly while streaming in the water and continue stirring until the mixture begins to come together. If the dough seems super sticky, add some more flour a tablespoon at a time, and stir or pulse to combine. Press the dough into a disk.

Place the dough in another medium-size bowl and drizzle it with olive oil. Turn the dough to coat it with oil. This will prevent a crust from forming on the dough while it is rising. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and place it in a warm, draft-free area to rise until doubled in volume (about 1 hour).

Shape the dough. Preheat your oven to 400°F. Line a rimmed baking sheet with unbleached parchment paper and set it aside. Once the dough has finished rising, divide it into 4 pieces of roughly equal size, and with floured hands shape each piece into a ball. Place one ball of dough at a time (covering the other two with a moist towel), on a well-floured surface, and dust the dough liberally with extra flour. Roll into a rectangle 8 inches long by 6 inches wide, and between 1/8 inch and 1/4 inch thick, dusting with flour if the dough becomes sticky. With a sharp knife or pastry wheel, slice the rectangle into 4 smaller rectangles, each 2 inches wide by 6 inches long. Repeat with the remaining 3 balls of pizza dough.

Assemble the pigs in a blanket. With a sharp knife, slash each weenie on one side, along its length about halfway through the weenie. This is to allow steam to escape while the pigs bake. Take the first rectangle of dough, place a weenie on a short side right at the edge, and roll the weenie up tightly in the dough. Press the edge against the weenie to seal, and place the pig and blanket on the prepared baking sheet. Repeat with the remaining rectangles and weenies, and place them about 1 inch apart from one another on the baking sheet.

Bake the pigs in a blanket. Place the baking sheet in the center of the preheated oven and bake until the dough is brown around the edges and lightly brown on top, about 10 minutes. Remove from the oven, and allow to cool briefly before serving.

. . .

So the dough went together quite easily, no problem there.  I was afraid that the dough would be a bit sticky as most gluten free dough ends up to be, but it was not.  It was actually quite crumbly.  I squished it together and slathered it with oil as the directions said to do.  We had a fire going, so I put it on the hearth to let it rise for an hour.

It did not rise.

I wasn't going to just toss the dough, so I went ahead and rolled it out on a large wooden cutting board to about a quarter inch thickness.  I had seen a different technique  for wrapping the weenies than what the recipe suggested.  I split the dough into two and rolled it out.  Then I used a pizza cutter and cut the dough into long triangles.  I wrapped the smokies and they looked so beautiful!  Just like they were supposed to!  I had to bake them about ten minutes longer than as described in the recipe and then they never really browned.  They also never puffed up.  The dough didn't taste bad, but it was harder than I'd expected.

I will try this again, but I will use my tried and true pizza dough recipe.  At the end of the recipe, I saw that it had been adapted from Gluten-Free on a Shoestring: 125 Easy Recipes for Eating Well on the Cheap, by Nicole Hunn.  Nicole Hunn has published several books and is well known for her gluten free adaptations of lots of different popular, mainstream recipes.

My final thought is, if it's not broke, don't fix it.

Savannah's been working on her plating techniques