I used to be a bit judgmental about people who ate low-carb. I thought they were weird. Sad. Obsessive. Crazy. Crazy because who doesn’t want to stuff themselves full of carbs??? But now that I eat mostly low carb I get it. You lose weight when you turn to a low-carb lifestyle. Your stomach feels flatter. You feel better about yourself. And most importantly, for me, you can eat food that’s considered really bad for you. All the time. So you’re always satisfied.
A couple years ago I was moving from California to Arizona and trying to get rid of food items in my fridge/freezer. I’ve been going through my freezer recently realizing I have a lot of food in there and needing to purge the aging food. I found a couple packages of chicken thighs I’d bought during a spell when I was feeding my diabetic dog chicken only. I thought about making some sort of a southwest pizza with chicken, salsa and cream cheese – all ingredients I have on hand.
For some reason I got stuck on the idea of pizza rolls (because they are so cool looking) so I decided to make those instead. I found a recipe to model my rolls after at the website ketogasm.com.
dough ingredients.
- 12 oz shredded mozzarella cheese (low moisture, part skim)
- 2 T. cream cheese
- ¾ c. almond flour
- 1 egg
- ½ tsp. garlic salt
filling ingredients.
- 4 oz cream cheese, room temperature
- ¼ to ½ c. southwest salsa
- 6 oz chopped boneless skinless chicken breast (cooked, seasoned to taste)
- 8 oz Monterey Jack cheese, shredded
directions.
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Lay out parchment paper on a flat surface and spray with cooking spray.
- Melt the mozzarella and cream cheese in the microwave for 60 to 90 seconds. Stir in almond flour, garlic salt and egg with the melted cheese mixture to form the dough. The dough will be sticky.
- Place the dough on the prepared parchment paper and cover with a second piece of parchment paper. With a rolling pin, roll out the dough in the shape of a rectangle. You want the dough to be relatively thin. Remove the top parchment paper and place the dough on a cookie sheet. Bake for 2 to 3 minutes.
- Meanwhile, mix the cream cheese and salsa together with a fork in a small bowl. You can do this in a mixer but it’s a relatively tiny amount to dirty your mixing bowl and whisk.
- Remove the crust from the oven. Spread the cream cheese mixture evenly across the hot crust. The heat from the crust will help the cream cheese melt a bit which will make it easier to spread the sauce. Sprinkle the chicken across the top and then the cheese. You want all ingredients to be distributed as evenly as possible. It’s OK not to take the ingredients all the way to the edge.
- Starting with one edge of the crust, gently roll into a log (the long way). Using a sharp knife, cut into even slices. I got about 16 huge pizza rolls that got smoothed when I cut them. So I decided to individually re-roll each of the rolls. This ensured the rolls were more round instead of oblong and the ingredients were held tight against the crust.
- Lay slices flat (and evenly spread out) on a cookie sheet. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes and remove from oven; flip rolls over. Return to oven and bake for 10 to 15 more minutes.
The directions above are written as what I would have done had I known better. While I think it would be wise to use a cooking spray when baking the rolls, I’m not sure parchment paper is necessary. I found it hard to remove the paper from the bottom of the rolls. Also, I crowded my rolls together which meant that the inner rolls didn’t really get done on the sides. I baked the rolls for about 25 minutes total. I noticed that the bottoms were nice and golden brown and the tops looked cooked in spots and undercooked in spots. For that reason, I would flip them over halfway through baking. I believe these will reheat very nicely, especially on my pizza pizzaz.
I swear you almost cannot tell the difference between the dough in these rolls and normal pizza rolls. I could eat low carb pizza or pizza rolls every day of the week and not get sick of them.
Food Snob 