If your favorite part of a pizza is the stuffed crust, you’re going to want to try Martha Stewart’s recipe for mozzarella-stuffed garlic-and-herb bread. While it may look like a pizza or flatbread at first glance, it focuses solely on all the elements you love about a stuffed crust: bread, herbs, and cheese. If you want to get technical here, Pizza Hut’s Original Stuffed Crust pizza uses just whole milk mozzarella, but Stewart gives hers a tasty upgrade by incorporating Parmigiano-Reggiano, minced garlic, Italian seasoning, fresh parsley, sesame seeds, and red pepper flakes.
“For this mozzarella-stuffed garlic-and-herb bread, we singled out the best part of a stuffed-crust pizza: the crust, of course,” Stewart explains on her Instagram page. The celebrity chef recommends serving it with a side of warm marinara sauce if you’re looking to replicate the flavors of a full pizza. If marinara sauce isn’t your favorite, you could also go with ranch, barbecue, buffalo, or even hot honey. However, the bread would also work well alongside a bowl of tomato-based pasta, dipped in tomato soup, as an appetizer for a special occasion, or as a gameday snack.
How to make Martha Stewart’s mozzarella-stuffed garlic-and-herb bread
Despite the fact that Stewart’s recipe involves making the bread from scratch, you only need 20 minutes of prep time. To make the dough, you’ll want to combine unbleached bread flour with active dry yeast, salt, warm water, and olive oil. Once the mixture has been kneaded, you’ll need to let it sit for over an hour — so you may want to prepare the dough earlier in the day to give yourself enough time. Before you bake it, you’ll stretch it out, brush half with oil, and sprinkle mozzarella on top. Stewart specifies that you can use whole or part-skim mozzarella, whichever you prefer.
To make the “stuffed” part of the bread, you’ll place the second half of your stretched-out dough over the mozzarella, so you’re essentially building one giant grilled cheese. After you’ve sealed the edges, the surface gets topped with even more oil and cheese (this time that finely grated parmesan), along with the rest of the seasonings. It’s important to cut slits throughout the top layer of the dough before you bake it since all that cheese is sandwiched underneath. And once you remove it from the oven, there’s no need to wait for it to cool down. Just like your favorite stuffed-crust pizza, Stewart’s herby mozzarella garlic bread is meant to be served hot and fresh while the cheese is melted and gooey.
