Pizza Cones 30-Oct-2011
Pizza in a cone! Portable, personalized, plentiful pizza cones, make your own pizza cones at home with this fun and simple food hack.
Using an empty aluminum drink can as a cone-form and a standard pizza recipe, you can make your own pizza cones and take a new twist on a classic Italian dish.
These cones are great for parties, game day or just a fun way to make any pizza dinner more awesome!
Each cone is made not to drip and can be personalized with different ingredients for each hungry person.
Ingredients
Dough
- 1 tablespoon dry active yeast
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 2 cups warm water
- 5 cups flour (any kind)
- 1 tablespoon salt
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- spices: oregano / basil / thyme / italian parsley
Cone Holders
(Have to construct these, see the instructable.)
- aluminum soda cans
- heavy duty sheers
Directions
Step 1: Activate Yeast
Stir yeast and sugar into warm water and set aside. The dried yeast takes a few minutes to reactivate from it’s freeze-dried, dormant state - the warm water activates the yeast and the sugar is the food they love. Imagine an all you can eat buffet of your favourite food served to you while you’re relaxing in a jacuzzi. Awesome, right? The yeast are doing just that.
Let the yeast do its thing for about 5 minutes, you’ll start to see bubbles form at the top when it’s ready. In the meantime you can mix the dry ingredients together.
Step 2: Combine Dry Ingredients
Combine all the dry ingredients and spices into a large mixing bowl. I used a combination of fresh and dried herbs, you can add whatever kind of spices you like to make your own custom dough.
Step 3: Mix in Wet Ingredients
By the time you’ve mixed the dry ingredients your yeast should be ready to go. Give the yeast a quick stir and combine with the dry ingredients along with the olive oil. If you have a kitchen mixer with a dough hook, let it run for about 5 minutes. I don’t have a mixer so I mixed with my hands. After a few minutes mixing in the bowl to ensure a semi-consistent mixture I turned the dough onto a large flat surface dusted with flour and kneaded the dough until it was warm and elastic.
Once dough has been mixed it needs to rest. During this resting period the yeast will continue eat the sugars and start to produce CO2 gas which will give your dough a soft and bubble texture. Roll dough into ball and transfer to a clean bowl. Drizzle olive oil over dough, then cover with a kitchen cloth and let rest at room temperature for about an hour.
While the dough is resting it’s time to make the cone holders from those aluminum cans.
Step 4: Create Cone Holders
In order to bake the pizza cones they will need to held upright during baking, for this we’ll use a modified aluminum drink can. Remove the tops from the cans with a sharp hobby knife or heavy-duty scissors, then rinse out the insides. Vertical slits were cut into each can creating ‘fingers’, these fingers can easy be bent to accept cones of different sizes (as no two pizza cones are going to be exactly alike in shape).
Cut aluminum cans are very sharp, so be careful.
Step 5: Roll Out Dough
After the dough has rested for about an hour you’ll notice that it’s increased in volume, my dough was almost twice its size!
Turn dough into a large, flat floured surface and begin stretching and rolling dough into a large thin sheet. For pizza cone dough you’re going to want the dough to be really thin, about 3mm [1/8”]. For reference regular pizza dough is usually rolled out to a thickness of around 6mm-8mm [1/4”+ ].
Step 6: Trace Shapes, Parbake
There’s a few different ways to make a conical shape from flat dough. I chose to experiment with paper to get the best cone shape I could without too much dough overlap. When I was happy with my shape I transferred the paper template to the dough and cut out the shapes.
The shapes were loaded onto a flat tray and par-baked in a 200°C [400°F] oven for under a minute. Once removed from the oven they were immediately shaped into a cone, the soft edges of each cone was pressed together, and then they were placed placed in the modified aluminum can and allowed to cool. After cooling you should have a semi-baked cone, with minimal dough overlap (d’overlap?) and a no seam gaps.
Step 7: Fill Cones
After cones are placed in the modified aluminum cans I placed cheese in the bottom of each cone as an ad hoc plug, just in case there were any gaps left when forming each cone.
Tomato sauce was slathered inside each cone, then each cone was filled with personalized ingredients. Make sure to mix in extra cheese with your other ingredients when filling the cones, this will give your pizza cones that extra cheezey goodness that you’re guests will love. Once filled each cone was topped with more cheese.
Step 8: Bake
Bake in a 175°C [350°F] oven for about 7-10 minutes. The top cheese should have melted along with all the cheese inside, perfect! During this bake the dough will also finish cooking.
Once cooked through, carefully remove the aluminum cone holders from the oven and let cool for about a minute before removing from the cans. Gently ease each cone from its holder and wrap the the bottom of the cone with paper towel and serve.
Make sure to let these cool off sufficiently before serving – they will be very hot!
Really, do go to the instructable to see the way these are made – the pictures are great!