Make Your Own Pizza Bagels

Pizza is a staple at our house.  My kids would seriously eat it every single day if I’d let them.  Getting them all to agree on pizza is not the easiest task.  Here’s how we solve the great pizza dilemmas that come up at our house. (Here’s a hint: pizza bagels can save the day!)

 

Pizza Delivery

Of course we order pizza from time to time, but it gets tricky (and expensive) to order everyone’s favorites all the time.  And it never fails…our pizza delivery people are either way too fast or it seems like it takes forever (but I’m also kind of impatient sometimes – especially when hangry).  

Making Your Own Pizzas

We also make our own pizzas sometimes too, but again it gets expensive to buy everyone’s favorite toppings and takes a while to prep everything to get ready to actually make the pizza.  And do you have the great debate at your house about how the pizza should actually be cooked??  I like my pizza more well done – golden brown bubbly cheese and a nice crispy crust.  Some of my kids like super soft crusts (heaven forbid if it turns the slightest brown on the bottom and becomes “burnt”) and the cheese barely melted.  Another kid likes theirs brown on the top but not on the bottom.  It becomes quite the juggling act when we’re baking our own pizzas.

Individual Pizzas

One way to help make sure everyone is happy is to make or buy everyone’s own pizzas with their favorite toppings.  Just split your pizza dough up if you’re making it at home and let everyone do their own things.  For frozen pizzas, you can buy one that is the closest to what you’d like and spice it up with your own toppings or extra cheese once you’re home and ready to make it.  This way helps to keep everyone happy without tons of leftovers or extra money (and time) being spent.

Make Your Own Frozen Pizzas

When you’re making pizzas, you can always stop once it’s assembled before you bake it and wrap it up to freeze.  Consider making your pizzas on a piece of parchment paper so you can leave it right on that and put it into the oven.  You should still be able to peel the paper off to cook it on your pizza stone or oven rack if you’d like to.  Just wrap it up well with plastic wrap and aluminum foil or a freezer zip top bag to keep it safe inside your freezer.  You can even store them in a plastic container if you’re worried about them getting smushed or lost in the freezer.  When you’re ready to enjoy your homemade frozen pizzas, you can either bake them from frozen or let them defrost and bake them that way.

Party Pizza

Pizza’s also a popular party food.  It’s easy to grab some and eat without it being too much of a mess. Most everyone likes pizza so it’s a pretty “safe” food to serve when you’ve got a crowd of people too.  For kids parties (and adults too – why should kids have all the fun?), doing a make your own pizza bar is a great way to take the stress of you making sure there’s something everyone will eat.  Letting your guests make their own pizzas will not only give you an activity for your party, but make sure everyone has something they’ll enjoy to eat.   

Set up your pizza making station with pieces of parchment and pencils for the guests to write their names or initials on to help get the pizzas back to their makers.  Put out all the available sauces and toppings and let your guests go to town.  You could add suggestions for people who might want to try something new.  Keep your oven going or use a toaster oven to help keep the pizzas getting made.

Using What You’ve Got to Make Pizza

Don’t be afraid to get outside the box either when you’re making your pizzas.  Try making them on bagels (big or small), garlic bread, tortillas, english muffins, or whatever else you’ve got.  Check out the recipe below for tips for making pizza bagels at home.

Pizza Making Supplies

Depending on what kind of pizza we’re making, our supplies vary a little bit.  For smaller frozen pizzas, I usually just throw them on the oven rack directly or pop them on a cookie sheet. If it won’t fit down into your cookie sheet, flip it over and let the pizza cook on what would normally be the bottom of the cookie sheet.  (Here’s a tip: I line everything with aluminum foil so if the cheese melts over the edge in the bottom of the oven or onto the pan, cleanup is super easy.)

You can also use pizza stones.  These can be great to help make your pizzas super crunchy on the bottom.  Just be sure to let your stone heat up and cool down with your oven so it doesn’t break due to the quick temperature changes.

For the toppings, I just use small bowls that I have lids for so we can clean up quickly and put things away once the pizzas are made.  Small tongs or spoons can help keep little hands out of the bowls too.  (We prefer tongs at our house because it’s like a special treat because we don’t use them all the time.)

I personally love a pizza cutter with a big handle.  For me, it makes it easier to hold on to and seems to make the cutting easier.  You’ll want one that’s fairly sharp to cut through your pizza easily, but also not sharp enough to cause harm while cutting your pizza.

When we put our pizza right on the oven rack, I use a pizza peel to get it out of the oven.  You can get one without spending too much.  If it’s not in the budget or you don’t have the space, you could use tongs to pull your pizza off the rack onto the back of a cookie sheet to get it to the counter or table.

Here’s a recipe to make your own pizza bagels right at home.  This is a perfect way for the kids to help make dinner.  Now the directions for this are for an air fryer but you can make these in a regular or toaster oven too.

Ingredients 

• Mini Bagels
• Pizza Sauce
• Mini Pepperoni 
• Mozzarella Cheese

Once you’ve gathered up all your ingredients to make your pizza bagels, start out by slicing your bagels in half.  Lay them out inside facing up to add ingredients to them.  

Add some pizza sauce to your pizza bagels.  Since everyone is making their own mini pizzas, let them add as much sauce as they’d like.  

Next it’s time to add some cheese to your pizza bagels.  Again, since everyone is making their own pizzas, let them add as much cheese as they’d like.  For some people, their pizza bagel making process will stop here because they just want a cheese pizza.  This is totally fine.  Just skip ahead to the baking part. 

If you’d like pepperoni or other toppings, now is the time to add them to your pizza bagels.  Don’t go too over the top on toppings.  They won’t cook evenly and you might overcook the top without the bagel warming up.

Place on the air fryer racks and air fry for 5 minutes at 360 degrees.  Remember, if you’re making your pizza bagels in the oven or toaster oven, that’s ok too.  

Once your pizza bagels are all cooked, it’s time to enjoy them.  Let them cool off a bit then dig in!