Frozen pizza rolls have long been a favorite of teenagers and anyone who needs a quick, delicious snack for after school or while watching TV. But, the store-bought versions are also sodium bombs, with high fat and very little nutritional value.
However, if you’re willing to invest a little bit of time, you can make your own in the air fryer. Homemade pizza rolls are surprisingly easy to make and won’t stretch your grocery budget too much.
Plus, when you make them at home, you can modify the ingredients that make pizza rolls so unhealthy. A recipe we found from Sustainable Cooks lowers the calories and carbs a bit per serving compared to, say, Totino’s Cheese Pizza Rolls, but doesn’t significantly change the amount of sodium. However, you do get a bit more protein, vitamin A and calcium.
You can also make these ahead of time so that they’re still an easy after-school option, too. Just store uncooked rolls in the freezer. Then, pop them out and bake them for the normal amount of time whenever you want them!
This is a versatile recipe: you can use store-bought ingredients like pizza sauce and egg-roll wrappers, or if you’re feeling more ambitious, you can make those from scratch. Check out this recipe from Spruce Eats if you’d like to try making your own egg-roll wrappers.
Then, you really just need your pizza ingredients — cheese, sauce, olive oil and pizza toppings of your choice. You’ll form them into that egg roll shape (Sarah Cook at Sustainable Cooks includes step-by-step instructions on how to do this) and then stick them into the air fryer for a total of eight minutes.
Remember that if you modify the recipe to include meat, the meat must be cooked before getting added to your roll. Also, the key to making this recipe work is not to overfill your egg rolls. Just don’t forget to put a small container of pizza sauce on the table for dipping! A container of Parmesan would also go well.
If you’re one of the few people who somehow escaped the COVID-19 pandemic without purchasing an air fryer, you can also use an oven or fry these up in a cast-iron skillet; alternative instructions are included in Cook’s recipe, which you can find here.
Everyone eats pizza rolls differently: some bite off a corner to let heat escape. Others wait a bit to allow them to cool down or punch holes in them with a fork first. Some even eat them with silverware, but you also have your purists who refuse to make any accommodations and just pop them into their mouths without any regard for the consequences (that sauce can be like lava!). Which one are you?
This story originally appeared on Simplemost. Checkout Simplemost for additional stories.
