Forgiveness,Family, And Food

This next post is going to be on converting my Great Aunt’s pepperoni roll into to a gluten free alternative. There is a lot of backstory and history behind obtaining this recipe. After my Great grandmother passed away, My grandmother and her sister had a falling out and have not spoken in 35 years.  This is actually not uncommon being Italian since if you ever feel like you have been wronged, Italians carry a grudge for a very long time.  I don’t know the entire history and there is always two sides to every story but 35 years is a long time for sisters that were extremely close to not have talked.  Anyways, how I obtained this family recipe is through my Great Aunt’s son who lives in Southern California, who we have reached out to since it seems silly to let some differences that we aren’t even aware about prevent the rest of the family from connecting.  So over the holidays this year, we had dinner and drinks at their house and as an appetizer they served this pepperoni roll which was delicious.  This was something my Great Aunt would make regularly during the holidays when my parents were growing up and I wanted to see if I could convert this into a gluten free recipe in order to continue the tradition with my family.  The crazy part is just as we have my Great Grandma’s pizza recipe imprinted in a wood serving board, so did my cousins get there mom’s recipe carved into a wood serving board as well. (Peter is my Great Aunt’s son who we met up with).

To make the pizza dough I’m going to use a gluten free blend made up of brown rice and white rice flour for structure, potato starch for lightness and lift, tapioca starch for stretch and binding, and cassava flour for its mild flavor and ability to absorb liquid. Then will add a very small amount of Xanthan gum to provide more stretch.  

I’m finding making the dough has become the easy part. The tricky part with this recipe is shaping it into the roll.  You need to shape it jelly roll style which require flattening the dough and then gently rolling it around the ingredients we are including in the middle. In our case the pepperoni and mozzarella.

After a few attempts I started to get the hang of it, and made one that was ready to bake.  After 20 minutes of baking it had a nice browning and crispness to the dough, I took it out and let it cool before slicing it up and trying it.  

It was fantastic!  The flavors were as good as I had over the holidays.  It’s probably not something I would make regularly because it did take some work shaping the roll, but would be fun for special occasions and when making it together with some friends or family.