My birthday dish is Little Ceasar’s Crazy Bread and marinara dipping sauce.
If you know you know. But if you don’t know, they are these garlicky, cheesy, buttery, fluffy pizza dough sticks that you dip in tomato packed marinara sauce. I LOVE CRAZY BREAD. And my love affair started as a pre-teen when friends and I would venture up to the local strip mall in suburbia and munch on them while sitting on the dirty curb of some grocery store. Pure heaven and carb glory.
CRAZY BREAD
SERVES: 4
COOKS IN: 2 hours + 15 min
INGREDIENTS
½ cup of warm water
1 tsp of honey
2 1/2 teaspoons of instant yeast
1 cup of water
2-3 tablespoons olive oil
4 cups of bread flour or about 500 grams (keep a bit aside to flour your rolling surface)
1 teaspoons salt
3 tbsp melted butter
3 garlic cloves smashed
A nice pile of grated Parmesan cheese
*if you don’t have bread flour just use all-purpose flour. The bread flour has more protein and gluten than all-purpose making the dough chewier and denser.
INSTRUCTIONS
Place the 1/2 cup of warm water, yeast and honey together in a cup and whisk together. Let it sit for 10 min in a warm spot or until the yeast becomes active and bubbles.
In a bowl or your food processor add a cup of water, oil, and yeast mixture and mix together.
Next, add the salt and flour and blitz this all together. If you’re mixing this by hand, it will slowly turn into a ball of dough. If you’re using a food processor, on a medium-low setting with a dough hook, mix everything together until dough ball forms.
Knead or process until the dough is smooth and elastic-ish.
Next, cover the bowl and leave the dough to rise for 2 hours so that it doubles in size.
While this is going on melt your butter on low heat with the garlic cloves and salt to make a garlic butter sauce. Make sure not to burn the garlic. Set aside once the butter has been infused with garlic.
After 2 hours take the dough ball and smash it onto a floured surface. Roll out into a square if you can and about 1 inch thick. Cut the dough into 1 inch wide strips so they now look like breadsticks.
Set your oven to 375 degrees and bake on a lightly oiled oven pan for 15 min or until the breadsticks have a golden hue on top. Take them out and brush each stick with the garlic butter and parmesan cheese.
Eat right away and dip in marinara sauce
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MARINARA SAUCE
SERVES: 4
COOKS IN: 1 hour
INGREDIENTS
1 large can of whole tomatoes or crushed tomatoes
A couple of glugs of olive oil
1 tbsp of butter
1 carrot, diced
1 celery stalk, diced
1 onion, diced
4-5 garlic cloves, smashed
Pinch of dried oregano
Pinch of chilli pepper or red pepper flakes
Few leaves of chopped fresh basil
Salt and freshly cracked pepper to taste
INSTRUCTIONS
In a pot on medium-low heat, melt your butter and heat up the olive oil.
Chuck in the smashed garlic.
Once the garlic becomes aromatic, add in oregano and chilli flakes and let this simmer for a sec.
Next chuck in your carrot, celery, onion and mix together. Cover with a pot and let the vegetables sweat for a bit.
After a few minutes, add in the crushed tomatoes and let this simmer for 30 min. This is when the sauce will start to thicken up.
Add in the basil and salt and pepper, let it simmer for 5 more min.
Once you like the taste of it, blitz it with a hand blender or emulsion blender (Because the sauce is hot hot hot, be careful or wait for it to cool down before blitzing it).
Eat right away or freeze it for later.
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