PIGS IN A BLANKET
I’ve always enjoyed pigs in a blanket as a snack food at various parties I’ve been to, but this year I wanted to give a shot at making them from scratch during a small party my friend, Bryan Postelnek, and I held before an annual fireworks display in our town.
Ingredients
~ 1 package cocktail franks (we used a Nathan’s brand and it had 42 franks)
~ 1 tube Pillsbury Crescent Roll dough (roughly enough dough for 42 franks)
Process
Set up an area where you can have the package of cocktail franks on the side and the rolling area for the pigs in a blanket (I’m going to call them PIBs for simplicity) on another side. When you pull out the crescent roll dough, it will have these pre-cut triangles in the dough. Tear these off one at a time and just put it onto a flat surface. You don’t really need a whole lot of dough to roll each PIB, so don’t be afraid to cut out a smaller piece (around 1.5 inches) and try rolling it up. It might take a few tries to get the measurement down right, but remember that the dough is stretchy and even if you cut a smaller piece by accident, you can stretch the dough out a little bit before rolling it up. The point is that you don’t want it to have a ton of dough on the outside for each bite. So, as you’re making the PIBs you can put the finished products onto a greased cookie baking tray, like the one you see in the picture above. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and pop these guys in the oven for about 20 minutes. They are definitely best served right out of the oven, so plan accordingly if you want to time this appetizer with guests arriving.
Today we decided to try to put cheese in ours, but a lot of it ended up melting out. So, if you do want to try it with cheese, I would suggest wrapping the entire cocktail frank, along with the cheese, inside the dough so that way it doesn’t ooze out and you can still capture the best of both flavors (something I will definitely try out when I make these again). We found that although the PIBs were still a bit soft when they came out of the oven, they still tasted really good. We made 84 PIBs tonight and they were all gone! But something that I would like to try next time to try to make them a little more crispy would either be to increase the oven temperature to 375 degrees and cook for about 10 minutes, or to use the 350 degree cooking avenue and finish it off with a 1 minute broil on high. Either way might work, so I’ll experiment a little bit. But feel free to let me know below how it turns out if you give it a shot!
Categories: Recipes
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