Recipe Test: Quinoa Pizza Bites with White Dipping Sauce

MY FEEDBACK AND CHANGES

FEEDBACK

This recipe is pretty prep/labor/time intensive for me (I like stuff I can throw together in the rice cooker or a skillet and be done with it) and for the amount of work that goes into it, there isn’t a whole lot of food to show (you’ll see this only makes 2 servings). I used a standard cupcake pan and filled 9 of the 12 holes – made 9 bites.

That being said, it was really delicious (except the dipping sauce – more on that later) and I can see making it as a grain side dish where everyone gets 2 bites which would make this a recipe with 4 servings. My husband said the bites tasted like meatballs and really liked them! Whooo!

So, in case I was ambiguous – the pizza bites themselves are the bomb and this is the perfect thing for when I crave Italian taste but can’t just eat a big ol bowl of pasta with spaghetti sauce. They’re the perfect size for a little savory snack too. They totally make up for the fiasco with the dipping sauce which was not great – see my remarks below.

CHANGES

A lot of the recipes I’ve tried from this book have turned out pretty horribly – I USUALLY have to adjust ingredients pretty substantially. This time was a little bit better, but I still had to make a ton of changes to make this workable – see below.

For the bites:

• Increase egg quantity to 2 eggs from 1 (1 egg and the “batter” wasn’t holding together that well – I made this with 2 and they held together nicely)
• Re: the pan – I “greased lightly” and the bites still stuck – I recommend greasing heavily and even having a tiny, thin pool of oil at the bottom of each cup
• My baking time was about 20 minutes, but I guess ovens are pretty variable. Start with 15 as recommended and use your best judgement.
• I used EVOO not grapeseed oil
• I used 6 heaping teaspoons of olive tapenade instead of chopping 6 olives
• I doubled the garlic 🙂

For the sauce:

Ugh, where to begin – this basically turned into a hot mess. Just looking at the ingredients I was thrown off – 2 cups of liquids?? How much of this sauce are we making? So I followed the recipe, but omitted the cup of water, and it tasted pretty tasteless, but was a good consistency. So then I over-salted it, and had to add another 1 TBsp of flour (I used quinoa, not millet, b/c that’s what I had on hand) and another 1/2 cup of coconut milk. The I added a lot of paprika, garlic powder and a heaping teaspoon of tapenade as it had basically no flavor besides salty. I also added a few whole basil leaves (I slapped them between my hands to release the oils and removed them from the sauce later). It was still pretty salty, so after it cooled (I stuck it in the freezer to make this go faster) I mixed 2/3 of this sauce with 1/3 goat yogurt and that improved the taste considerably.

Still, this sauce felt very heavy and tasted a little raw (maybe I didn’t cook it long enough?) and it made WAAAAAY too much. If I were you I would cut the sauce recipe in half, for sure.

The next time I make these bites, I’m making a very simple sauce by just mixing a little coco cream with goat yogurt, raw minced garlic, pepper and salt. Maybe paprika for color. None of this cooking a huge mass of goo for 20 minutes that feels really dense and gross. Nope.