This Super Bowl Casserole Is Home Run
Hello and welcome back to Will It Casserole? , a column in which I take your delicious concepts and reintroduce them as delicious casserole creations. We’re doing a real flavor hat-trick this week and combining three of my favorite snacks for watching football.
If I had to pick my favorite sports bar-inspired food, I couldn’t, because my heart is equally divided into pizza, wings and nachos. Rather than bake just one, I decided to combine all three to create a dish that I thought would be easy to soak. Did I care little about the taste mismatch? Sure, pepperoni pizza paired with queso cheese and buffalo chicken looks pretty unusual, but in the end, these three flavors fit quite harmoniously, and I’ll go to the rug to protect this combination.
To prepare a hot home-style meal, you will need:
- 1 can of giant biscuit dough
- 14 oz pizza sauce
- 4 cups grated mozzarella
- About 20 slices of pepperoni
- 4 chicken thighs, cooked and minced
- 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
- 1 cup Frank’s red hot sauce
- 8 ounces cream cheese
- 1 cup blue cheese crumbs
- 1 10oz Rotel can
- 16 oz Velveeta
- Several large handfuls of tortilla chips
- 1 cup grated cheddar
- Sour cream
- 1 chopped jalapeno
You will do this with a layer of pizza. Take mugs of chilled biscuit dough, cut them into quarters and add to a large bowl along with a can of sauce. Stir to coat, add mozzo and stir again. Place the mixture in a baking dish, sprinkle with pepperoni on top and bake in the oven at 375 degrees for about 25 minutes or until it looks like this:
It might be tempting to stop there, but keep working, we still have two layers. While the pizza layer is cooking, combine the butter, hot sauce, cream cheese, and blue cheese in a saucepan and heat over medium heat until you have a nice thick creamy sauce. Toss the shredded chicken and pour the mixture over the pizza base.
Combine Rotel and Velveeta and microwave as usual – don’t pretend you’re too good for this classic pairing – cook in 30 seconds and stir frequently. Once it’s nice and sticky, toss the chips on top of the Buffalo layer, pour the cheese mass on top of that and cover with the grated cheddar. Put the whole thing back in the oven until it bubbles and is lightly browned (about 20 minutes).
Let it cool slightly, drizzle with sour cream – a real great staple of any snack – and sprinkle with jalapeno slices to warm up (and the much-needed thick greens).
This, my friends, we call “a hole in one.” I thought the pizza would be our glass jaw to taste, but I’m happy to report that everyone got along great. The sweet pizza sauce and mozzarella helped reduce the heat from the buffalo layer a bit, but to be honest, it was just a big pile of cheese and it’s hard to go wrong with a big pile of cheese. I mean, all the key players in one bite, designed to be easy to eat with a fork, so you can focus on the Big Game rather than whether you sprinkle wings of sauce all over your host’s furniture.
However, I would recommend one or two Lactaid. Otherwise, in terms of the gastrointestinal tract, you may be on the losing side. A little discomfort is normal with this kind of food, but you could go and wiggle.