Stuffed Pizza Bites

by Jennifer Lee on Sep 15, 2011 (updated Oct 10, 2019)

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Stuffed pizza bites are a fun snack or appetizer. You can use pre-made pizza dough or make your own from scratch and each bite is stuffed with cheese and pepperoni and served with a marinara sauce for dipping. These pizza bites are just like a pizza except in a fun pull-apart bread roll form.

I’ve been pretty obsessed with pizza lately. The other day I had a craving for pizza bites. While I love the easy pepperoni pizza puffs I made, I was craving something with actual pizza dough. So, I set about making some homemade pizza dough balls and decided to stuff them with pepperoni and mozzarella.

Fluffy pizza dough, pepperoni, mozzarella cheese, and marinara sauce. All the ingredients for a pizza but in a cute bite-sized pull-apart ball form. The whole pie plate full of these stuffed pizza bites were gone within minutes. Yikes.

Can I use pre-made pizza dough for pizza bites?

What I like about pizza bites is that you can use homemade pizza dough or you can use pre-made pizza dough. They both work great. I’ve made these with premade dough before, but for this version, I used a pizza dough recipe I found on Simply Recipes.

Do you have to let the pizza dough rise before baking pizza bites?

If you are using pre-made pizza dough, once you stuff and seal the pizza dough balls you don’t have to let them rise. Just pop them in the oven to bake.

If you are making pizza dough from scratch, you will need to let it rise once before stuffing the pizza bites. Keep in mind, you can make the pizza dough ahead of time and keep it in the refrigerator until you’re ready to make stuffed pizza bites.

Can I use my favorite pizza toppings?

It depends on the toppings. The best (and easiest to work with) toppings are ones that are already cooked. Some vegetables won’t cook in the time it takes to bake the pizza bites, so you will end up with rolls stuffed with mostly raw ingredients. The same goes for different meat toppings. Meat fillings for pizza bites definitely need to be cooked first.

With that in mind, here are some ideas if you want to switch up the filling;

Any good melting cheese will work well, so you can switch out the mozzarella cheese for cheddar cheese, provolone cheese, Monterey jack cheese, Swiss cheese, and gruyere cheese. Or, use a combination of your favorites.
Grated or shredded Parmesan cheese is great for adding flavor, but it’s not a great melting cheese so use it in combination with another type of cheese. You could also sprinkle some on top of the rolls before you bake them.
Bell peppers, spinach, and mushrooms are some vegetable choices that would need to be cooked before you stuff them in the pizza bites. I would also finely chop them, too.
Shredded chicken, crumbled Italian sausage, bacon, and ground beef are good choices, just be sure to cook them first before stuffing the pizza bites.
You can switch out the pepperoni for Genoa salami, prosciutto, and ham and you don’t have to worry about cooking them first.

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