Pull-Apart Garlic Bread Pizza Dip

Since the first badger away game was last weekend, my friends and I were planning on watching it (to see them CRUSH Iowa) and naturally for any football game you need some great food to eat while watching. My friend Emma found this recipe for pull-apart garlic bread pizza dip that sounded pretty good, so I decided to go for it!

I made it out to fresh to grab all of the ingredients, which was not as easy as it sounds. The recipe calls for a specific kind of biscuits but doesn’t call them by their correct name (Pillsbury Grand Biscuits), among a lot of other things. When I made it back to my dorm, I went straight down to the kitchen. It was just remodeled this year and has two full-size refrigerators, two ovens, two stovetops, a backsplash, and more than enough counter space. It’s really nice for cooking a lot of food for a lot of people (which I was doing). I was actually doing a double batch because the recipe says that it feeds 8.

To start off the recipe, it asks that you mix a lot of the cold cheeses (including the cream cheese) and a few spices. My measurements were not exact, and maybe I overestimated, but I ended up with a lot of that cheese mixture on the bottom of the pan. I also think I should have softened the cream cheese a little longer because it was quite hard to mix all of that together. You then spread the pizza sauce and throw some mozzarella on top of that (for the pizza aspect) and start to build up the LAYERS. Side note- I would recommend adding more of the pizza sauce than you think, in the end, it had quite a bit of the bottom cheese layer and not enough of the sauce.

After that, you halve the biscuits from their container and roll them up into balls. Then, you place them in a 4×8 rectangle on your 9×13 baking pan. If you end up getting as much of the cheese layer as I did, you’re going to be looking for a slightly deeper pan than normal. With the bread balls laid out, everything’s all set to go. The final touch is pouring some of the garlic-parsley concoction of goodness that turns it into Italian bread over the bread balls and throw your last bit of parmesan on top!

The recipe says to cook the dish for 45 minutes straight to get the tops of the bread balls a lovely golden brown, before then putting tin foil on top of the dish to allow for the heat to spread out evenly over the dish. This allows for the biscuits to cook all the way through, which ended up being my fatal mistake.

As a freshman college student cooking out of their dorm’s kitchen, I didn’t think I’d end up needing tin foil. I also wasn’t about to buy a whole roll of tin foil for one dish that I probably won’t make again for a good while. By not using it, I didn’t allow for the biscuits to cook evenly and all the way through, so the bottoms ended up being quite underdone.

This was how they looked after the 45 minutes of baking, and although you can’t tell from the picture, the bottoms of these biscuits were just not cooked. Since I didn’t have any tin foil lying around, I flipped the middle of the rectangle, as the outside ones were cooked pretty well. But then they cooked just fine and I ended up with a pretty popular pizza bake.

The recipe states this to be a dip but it was most definitely a fork and knifer. The bottom was really messy and required a fork to actually get all of it. And other than my tinfoil mess up, it was overall a good preparation and execution. My friends quite enjoyed it, but I could never tell if they were just saying that to keep me happy about cooking or because they actually thought it was good since I screwed up the inner biscuits and made them wait longer than they should have to eat it.

Personally, the ricotta texture wasn’t for me, it wasn’t my favorite thing I’ve had and it definitely felt like it could have used some other hard substance (like breadcrumbs) to add to the texture. The dish also ended up tasting similar to lasagna, but not quite the same. Overall 8/10.

-Lars