Transform Canned Biscuits Into A Savory Dinner With Just A Few Ingredients

As much as we love a good takeout pizza, there's nothing quite as fun and delicious as the homemade variety. It's endlessly customizable, and the whole family can join in with picking sauces, cheeses, and toppings. Once you have the dough sorted, the meal comes together in no time, making it perfect for a busy weeknight or a late-night snack. About that dough, though. Traditional pizza dough made with yeast requires kneading, resting, and shaping, and it's this process that keeps homemade pizza from being something you can enjoy whenever the mood strikes. One simple ingredient swap fixes that dilemma: canned biscuits, which have a surprising number of unexpected uses.

If you have a can of biscuit dough in your fridge, you're already halfway to fresh, hot pizza. The crust might not be as doughy as a traditional pizza dough, but it will have buttery, flaky layers and perfectly crisp edges. With a few adjustments, canned biscuit dough will form the perfect base for your toppings, whether you're making small individual pies or a larger sheet pan pizza. You can use traditional flaky biscuits or denser Southern style. Though the texture of the crust will be slightly different, either will work. You can even make pizza with crescent rolls or sheets, which are the preferred choice if you're preparing a larger pie since you can just roll them out and stretch them to fit your pizza pan or baking sheet.

Your first step in transforming biscuits into pizza is to roll out the dough to your desired thickness. Biscuit dough tends to be stickier than pizza dough (which is stretched rather than rolled), but we have a couple of tips you can try to make the process foolproof. One is to put the biscuits between sheets of parchment paper or plastic wrap. Another is to sprinkle the surface with a little cornmeal, which will give you the taste and texture of an old-fashioned pizza parlor pie. 

Biscuits are also more tender and porous, so to avoid a soggy crust, pre-bake the biscuit pizzas for about five minutes before you add your sauce and toppings. If the biscuits start to puff as they're baking, use a large spoon or the base of a small glass to press gently on the center to create a slight depression, being sure to leave a crust around the edges to grab hold of. If you're making a larger pizza, you can use sheets of crescent roll dough and press them into a pan with damp hands, but it's still best to pre-bake the crust for a few minutes. 

Whether you're making mini pizzas or a larger pie, once the biscuit crust has been parbaked for a few minutes, add a swirl of pizza sauce and a handful of cheese. The sky's the limit as far as your favorite toppings go.