Party flavors: Pizza puff pastry twists

The party food landscape has become increasingly homogeneous, with its ubiquitous bag of Doritos rather than homemade fudge or stuffed mushrooms. Columnist Erin Nyren would like to bring back the house parties of yore, in which everyone cooked or baked something to share.

When I first started making food in my apartment, I asked myself why people didn’t do this more often.

To me, the recipes I tried weren’t very complicated, yet every time I would tell other students about them, they’d act surprised that I was cooking something that sounded so fancy. Then I wondered what the obstacle was that prevented most students from cooking. The more people I talk to, the more I’ve come to think that it’s just perception.

The students I talk to generally think cooking takes a lot of time, research and money. But in reality, making good food doesn’t always require as much of an investment, particularly with party food. This week’s recipe for pizza puff pastry twists does a perfect job of combining inexpensive ingredients with an extremely small amount of time.

The 15-minute food prep was the shortest that I’ve done so far for this column. It was also fairly inexpensive. The premade puff pastry dough was the most expensive component – $5.99 for the two sheets at Ralphs. It’s possible to spend an hour making the dough yourself and save a few bucks, but personally, the opportunity cost wasn’t worth it.

The recipe called for pizza sauce, but I don’t make much distinction between red sauces: pizza sauce, pasta sauce, all the same to me. Because I wanted to do this recipe as inexpensively as possible, I bought a can of Hunt’s traditional pasta sauce. It was only $0.99 and tasted only slightly inferior to the jars of pasta sauce I routinely buy from Trader Joe’s.

A difficult part of this recipe was cutting the strips of dough after placing the glass in the middle of the circle, and even that was not particularly challenging.

The primary obstacle was finding a balance between making my strips the right width and getting as many twists out of the circle as possible. My first thought was wider strips would be easier to twist. My desire to get as many twists out of the dough as I could won out, though, so I cut the circle into even fourths and then split those fourths into thirds for a total of 12 twists. Still, I worried the 12 strips were too slender.

My fears turned out to be baseless, however, because the wider strips were actually harder to twist. The cheese and sauce tended to squish out the sides. Try as I might to secure the end of the twist down to the pan to prevent it from untwisting, it did its best to foil my efforts. The thinner strips were much more obliging and the dough was sticky enough that they didn’t break off from the center.

The recipe didn’t specify how to make the egg wash, and even though I was pretty sure that an egg wash consisted solely of a whisked egg, I Googled it to make sure. I added some water to my egg because I am generally more trusting of culinary recommendations on the web than I am of my own instincts, which have proven to be questionable in the past.

After I finished coating the wheel of dough with the egg wash, I placed it in the oven and set the timer for 20 minutes. After only a few minutes had passed, I could already smell the puff pastry, sauce and cheese baking.

Since the recipe uses pastry dough, the dish didn’t taste quite like pizza. It was still satisfying and perfect for a party because it can be easily transported and divided among many people.

Putting cheese on top of the center of the wheel, where all of the twists intersect, adds a nice touch – that way whoever is left with the center gets to eat more than just puff pastry, which is what I found myself doing after giving away half of the twists and eating the rest for dinner.

This dish cost me about $10 total, which, admittedly, costs more than a bag of Tostitos and a jar of Pace. To me, though, making food to share means so much more than running to the store and grabbing something that anyone could pick up. It shows appreciation for the people you’re sharing with.

What’s the best food you’ve ever eaten at a party? Email Nyren at [email protected].