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Pizza Monkey Bread Recipe

Monkey bread, tear and share bread or pull apart bread? Make this tasty pizza sauce filled beauty that will prove name doesn’t matter!

Pizza making is a highly calibrated process that require all the processing power our brain can provide to solve highly sophisticated equations about the correct amount of moisture, yeast and temperature, the bread needs to create truly amazing pizzas.

Well, or at least this is the case outside of Italy. In Italy people make pizzas with reptilian brain when they are strong enough to pick up the pizza peel.

Impossible as it seems when first starting out eventually, we can master pizzas in the sacred sanctuary of our homes too. The beginning is hard and stressful but after some time and countless hours of YouTube tutorials in pursuit of the perfect pizza we can get the highest point of our journey.

Realizing that we have reached a peak in our life, can be a double-edged experience. On one side, it should provide immense satisfaction that we came through so much thick and thin to achieve it but on the other side, sometimes we should realize that there is only one way to go from a top of a mountain and that is down.

Luckily the euphoria of success takes us through the downward slope and we can reach the same height a couple of more times before our thinking brain realizes that we are doing the same thing over and over again and takes over the leash.

This is how a bread like this pull apart monkey pizza bread could come to life, form an extra batch of accidental pizza sauce. Not like pizzas would need any special sauce except from pureed tomato but frying them with a bit of onion and herbs wouldn’t hurt anybody.

So, filling pizza sauce into pockets of fresh yeast dough, as a way to achieve new heights in our spiritual kitchen journey, is a summit definitely worth mounting. It’s a soft fluffy bread that tears like it was made of clouds and filled with the hundred years old essence of Italian kitchen. What could be more divine?

Ingredients

Dough

3½ cup / 600g Flour
7 tablespoon / 100g Butter
1 Egg
½ cup / 100ml Milk
⅞ cup / 200ml Water
0.5 oz / 15g Fresh yeast

Filling

16 oz / 500g Tomatoes
6 Basil leaves (fresh)
1 teaspoon Oregano
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup / 100ml Olive oil
7 oz / 200g Cheese (topping)

Kitchen utensils

8½” x 3″ / 22cm x 7.5cm Baking tray (minimum size)

How to make Pizza monkey bread

Bread

In a kneading bowl measure flour, sliced room temperature butter, egg, milk, water and crumbled fresh yeast.
Knead the mixture well until it’s even and there’s no flour left on the edge of the bowl.
Cover the bowl and leave it in a 68°F – 81°F /20°C – 27°C place to rise for about 45 – 90 minutes depending on temperature. (We can put it in the briefly heated 100°F / 40°C oven. Be careful not to turn the heat higher than that as it would kill the yeast so the dough didn’t rise.)

Filling

In the meantime, prepare the filling. Chop tomatoes or simply use pureed tomato, basil, oregano, salt and olive oil in a blender.
Pour it into a saucepan, bring it to boil and simmer it in low-medium heat for about 20 minutes while stirring occasionally. Take it off heat and set it aside. Pouring hot sauce on the dough would make it gooey and so hard to handle that it would ruin our day.

For more detailed explanation about How to make tomato sauce check out the Low Carb Condiments

Assembly

After an hour waiting take dough out of the bowl onto a well-floured work surface. Roll it into a square. Flouring underneath the dough is important as this coating will prevent it to stick down.
Cut the rolled out dough into 4×4 equal squares.
Spoon the preferably room temperature tomato sauce into each small squares.
Quickly make little dough balls out of them by grabbing the opposite corners and pressing them lightly together.
When making the balls, use a plastic scraper to help getting the dough off the worktop if it’s necessary. The dough is quite soft so try not to pull it more than necessary.
Place the dough balls into a pizza tray loose otherwise they could stick together.
Brush the leftover tomato sauce on top.
Finish it with putting grated cheese on top then set the dough aside in a warm place to rest/raise for another 20 minutes.
Put the monkey bread into the 350°F / 180°C preheated oven for about 30 minutes or until cheese gets golden brown.