When I started the Blood Type Diet last October, I soon found that it’s tricky to find fully-BTD-compliant prepared foods in the store (and next to impossible if I’m careful to avoid my personal allergens as well), so I’ve been doing a lot more cooking from scratch. Fortunately, I have also found that many recipes can be used for more than one purpose.

Pasta sauce can also be used on a pizza, for example. And any basic bread-dough recipe can be used to make the crust for that pizza – or dinner rolls, burger buns, bread sticks – you name it. All it takes is a little experimentation, so despite what your mother told you, do play with your food!

When Hubby and I make bread (using the recipe in my August 10 entry), we often earmark one loaf’s worth of the dough for pizza. That amount is perfect for a jellyroll pan (about 10 x 15” or 25 x 38 cm), oiled the same as for loaf pans. We shape the dough into a rough oblong a couple of inches (about 5 cm) thick, then let it “rest” on the pan for 10 or 15 minutes so the gluten will relax. The dough can then be patted out thin enough to cover the pan and form a raised edge. We let it rise for 20 or 30 minutes afterward (though I suspect it would still be good with a shorter rise time – just different). This makes a thick crust, a little bit puffy and a little bit chewy. We put the sauce and whatever toppings we want on the raw dough, then bake the whole thing for about an hour at 325 degrees F (160 C) – it needs to bake a bit longer with dense, heavy toppings and a bit less time with skimpy toppings.

Back in pre-BTD days, we would sometimes make dinner rolls from whole-wheat bread dough, and I see no reason why this wouldn’t also work with spelt dough. We just shaped the dough into balls, set them on an oiled cookie sheet, and let them rise till their bulk had about doubled (which means that if each ball started out as a quarter-cup of dough, for example, it had grown to about half a cup). Then we popped them into the oven and kept a very close eye on them, because they were done in something like 20 minutes. Someday I’m going to try the same thing with spelt dough, though I probably won’t let the rolls rise quite so much, because they’d be likely to fall somewhat in the oven. (Of course, I could just cut my fallen rolls in half around their equators and show everyone what beautiful burger buns I made – on my very first try!)

Or I could make bread sticks. I would divide my dough into small pieces, let them rest 10 or 15 minutes, then roll them between the palms of my hands until they were about the thickness of a pencil. Put them on an oiled cookie sheet, sprinkle them with salt, garlic salt, herbs, cheese, nutritional yeast, or whatever – even (maple) sugar & spice! Let them rise a little, then bake, which should take even less time than for rolls. Hey, I could even loop those dough pencils around to make soft pretzels! In that case, I might want to brush the tops with a beaten egg, for that shiny pretzel crust.

The main idea is to try some new things and have some fun.