Frozen Pizza Pockets

My husband has a weakness for cheap frozen food.  He loves cheap frozen taquitos and burritos.  I have a problem buying them because I flip over and look at the ingredients- the salt is way too high and the serving size way too small.  There's no way he'd only eat five taquitos or one small burrito, he'd easily eat twice that.  What to do??  Well, I had some left over pizza dough so I decided to make pizza pockets.

There was a BOGO sale on pizza dough the other day. One was used immediately for a spinach, turkey sausage, onion, and pepper pizza on an olive oil base and the other sat waiting for inspiration.  My first thought was to do rolls stuffed with pepperoni and pepper jack cheese (a West Virginian specialty according to my freshman year roommate), but nixed it because I didn't have pepperoni or pepper jack.  Then I realized I could make pizza pockets using ingredients on hand from the pizza the night before and some frozen pizza sauce from a couple months ago.

ingredients set up

After defrosting the sauce, I set up my ingredients:

- Turkey sausage
- mozzarella (we buy balls, not shredded)
- pizza sauce (homemade and seasoned with oregano, garlic, and basil)

- parmesan (optional, but it was in the fridge!)
- red pepper flakes (optional)


Basically, any combination of ingredients you'd put on a pizza would work.  I gently rolled the dough into a log and divided it into roughly equal pieces.  Taking one piece at a time, I gently stretched it into a round(ish) shape like I would for a large pizza.  Take your time, dough is fragile.

I spread about a teaspoon of sauce over the entire dough ball and over half put 5-6 pieces of sausage, roughly the same amount of mozzarella, a tiny bit of parmesan, and a dash of red pepper flacks.  

pizza pocket assembled

Then I folded half the dough over to form a pocket.  Look, a tiny calzone!  I use a fork to seal the edges and tried my best to not seal them too flat because I didn't want them to burn when I eventually cook them.  I froze them individually on a baking sheet so they wouldn't stick together and put them in vacuum bags after they were frozen in portions of 2 (for one person) or 4 (if we're both snacky).

pizza pockets frozen

According to a recipe I read, bake them at 400 for about 30 minutes frozen or 20 minutes defrosted.  I haven't actually cooked these yet so I don't know if that cooking time is accurate and I'll have to keep my eye on it. I'm excited to eat these!