It is the last Sunday of November. We decided on taking a break from making pizza this weekend due to the Thanksgiving holiday. There is enough food that gets eaten over the four days and making pizza on top of that was a bit much. I will instead write up about using the leftover dough from last weekend.

I was planning on making tacos for dinner Monday night but I kept thinking about the dough that was sitting in the fridge. I wasn’t really in the mood for pizza a second day in a row. Cheese sticks dipped in pizza sauce sounded good though. I don’t know how that is any different, but for some reason, it is for me.

I pulled out the one container of dough at around 5 o’clock and let it sit on the counter. Out of the fridge, the dough ball was looking like this:

I left it on the counter for 45 minutes and then tried to stretch it out. It was too loose and when I went to lift it off the counter, it sagged so much that the bottom part of the dough never left the counter. It had lost its structure and just was not workable at this point.

Notice how the edge of the dough at the bottom is very thick but then right above it is is so thin that holes have appeared. I gave up on this dough ball and tossed it in the garbage bin.

I had one dough ball left. This time I tried something completely different. I pulled the dough ball out of the fridge and immediately placed it on the cutting board. It was too rigid to stretch by hand so I instead used a rolling pin until it got to here:

I then put on the leftover cheese in the very precise amount of everything-left-in-the-bag, drizzled some olive oil on top, and then sprinkled it with a bit of garlic salt.

I slid the cheese sticks into the oven and after a few minutes, it looked like this:

Large air bubbles were forming. I probably should have used the docker on the dough when doing this. I grabbed a long knife and punctured as many bubbles as I could. I also forgot to remove the upper rack which is never good when taking photos.

I flipped the cheese bread around when I saw the back side baking faster than the front. I then pulled it out of the oven when it was looking like this:

It was looking good. It was smelling good. My mouth was watering. Instead of cutting it with the pizza cutter or using a knife, I tried out these new scissors that have appeared in our kitchen drawers:

These worked out very well. Especially with the thin crust on these cheese sticks. There was no leftover sauce from Sunday so I pulled out a jar of Classico pizza sauce that sits in the pantry waiting to be used in moments like this. I heated up the sauce in the microwave until it got to the temperature of splattering and dipped in the first slice:

I’ve had mixed results making cheese sticks in the past but these were a winner. I called Terri down for her to try some and she said these were the best so far.

It is good to know that cheese sticks can be made by overdeveloped dough when rolled out straight from the fridge. This also gives me some ideas for later when doing a thinner style of pizza.