Pizza Cones

Intro: Pizza Cones

Pizza in a cone!
Portable, personalized, plentiful pizza cones! Make you own pizza cones at home with this fun and simple food hack. Using an empty aluminum drink can as a cone-form and a standard pizza recipe, you can make your own pizza cones and take a new twist on a classic Italian dish. These cones are great for parties, game day or just a fun way to make any pizza dinner more awesome!

Each cone is made not to drip and can be personalized with different ingredients for each hungry person.

Enough talk, let's cone some pizza.

STEP 1: Ingredients + Materials

Pizza dough is really easy to make and ingredients can be substituted to suit your tastes, here's what I used:
pizza dough

• 1 tablespoon dry active yeast
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 2 cups warm water
• 5 cups flour (any kind)
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• spices: oregano / basil / thyme / italian parsley

cone holders

• aluminum drink cans
• heavy-duty scissors

.

STEP 2: Activate Yeast

Stir yeast and sugar into warm water and set aside. The dried yeast takes a few minutes to reactivate from it's freeze-dried, dormant state - the warm water activates the yeast and the sugar is the food they love. Imagine an all you can eat buffet of your favourite food served to you while you're relaxing in a jacuzzi. Awesome, right? The yeast are doing just that.

Let the yeast do its thing for about 5 minutes, you'll start to see bubbles form at the top when it's ready. In the meantime you can mix the dry ingredients together.

STEP 3: Measure + Mix

Combine all the dry ingredients and spices into a large mixing bowl. I used a combination of fresh and dried herbs, you can add whatever kind of spices you like to make your own custom dough.

By the time you've mixed the dry ingredients your yeast should be ready to go. Give the yeast a quick stir and combine with the dry ingredients along with the olive oil. If you have a kitchen mixer with a dough hook, let it run for about 5 minutes. I don't have a mixer so I mixed with my hands. After a few minutes mixing in the bowl to ensure a semi-consistent mixture I turned the dough onto a large flat surface dusted with flour and kneaded the dough until it was warm and elastic.

Once dough has been mixed it needs to rest. During this resting period the yeast will continue eat the sugars and start to produce CO2 gas which will give your dough a soft and bubble texture.
Roll dough into ball and transfer to a clean bowl. Drizzle olive oil over dough, then cover with a kitchen cloth and let rest at room temperature for about an hour.

While the dough is resting it's time to make the cone holders from those aluminum cans.

STEP 4: Make Cone Holders

In order to bake the pizza cones they will need to held upright during baking, for this we'll use a modified aluminum drink can.
Remove the tops from the cans with a sharp hobby knife or heavy-duty scissors, then rinse out the insides.
Vertical slits were cut into each can creating 'fingers', these fingers can easy be bent to accept cones of different sizes (as no two pizza cones are going to be exactly alike in shape).

Cut aluminum cans are very sharp, so be careful.

STEP 5: Roll Dough Flat

After the dough has rested for about an hour you'll notice that it's increased in volume, my dough was almost twice its size!

Turn dough into a large, flat floured surface and begin stretching and rolling dough into a large thin sheet. For pizza cone dough you're going to want the dough to be really thin, about 3mm [1/8"]. For reference regular pizza dough is usually rolled out to a thickness of around 6mm-8mm [1/4"+ ].

STEP 6: Trace Shapes, Cut, Then Par-bake

There's a few different ways to make a conical shape from flat dough.
I chose to experiment with paper to get the best cone shape I could without too much dough overlap. When I was happy with my shape I transferred the paper template to the dough and cut out the shapes.

The shapes were loaded onto a flat tray and par-baked in a 200°C [400°F] oven for under a minute. Once removed from the oven they were immediately shaped into a cone, the soft edges of each cone was pressed together, and then they were placed placed in the modified aluminum can and allowed to cool. After cooling you should have a semi-baked cone, with minimal dough overlap (d'overlap?) and a no seam gaps.

STEP 7: Fill Cones

After cones are placed in the modified aluminum cans I placed cheese in the bottom of each cone as an ad hoc plug, just in case there were any gaps left when forming each cone.

Tomato sauce was slathered inside each cone, then each cone was filled with personalized ingredients. Make sure to mix in extra cheese with your other ingredients when filling the cones, this will give your pizza cones that extra cheezey goodness that you're guests will love. Once filled each cone was topped with more cheese.

STEP 8: Bake

Bake in a 175°C [350°F] oven for about 7-10 minutes. The top cheese should have melted along with all the cheese inside, perfect! During this bake the dough will also finish cooking.

Once cooked through, carefully remove the aluminum cone holders from the oven and let cool for about a minute before removing from the cans. Gently ease each cone from its holder and wrap the the bottom of the cone with paper towel and serve.

STEP 9: Be Careful, They're Hot!

Time to eat!
Everyone gets a personalized cone with all their favourite ingredients, and of course loads of gooey cheese!

Have fun!

Did you make your own pizza cones? Leave a comment below with a picture of your own pizza cones.

Happy making :)

Comments

[keyosuke]

This reminds me of the once famous "Beer Can Chicken" recipe, where a whole chicken is cooked atop a half full beer can. The concept thrilled beer enthusiasts and the chicken did stay as moist as the recipe claimed it would, so popularity soared, but the last thing I heard about it before I stopped hearing about it was that the heat from roasting the chicken would vaporize some of the leaded paint on the outside of the can (and possible other delicious paint components as well), contaminating the chicken resting on the outside of the can with a chemical residue to taste odd, but still not a good thing to eat. I wonder if the coating all cans have on their inside (usually plastic) and the paint many cans have on their outside isn't being baked into this pizza crust. I'm sure this instructable can be done with bent sheet metal or with some other custom cone holder, but I suggest it might be a good idea to look into the safety of what's being baked off the recyclables and lets us know if there are any risks.

[holomorph]

hmm, perhaps a muffin tin would be an appropriate substitute; the cones would end up more snack size though.

[keyosuke]

I've been brainstorming of a substitute too, because this is probably the instructable I like most on the whole site. After looking at the picture above for a while I started wondering "Why not use a whole slew of Pyrex measuring cups?". It would be expensive but at least you'd still get something like a pizza cone. Anyone else have an idea for an oven safe cyllinder with a wide lip?

[Dirt_Daddy]

With the amount of used pyrex at the resale/Goodwill/Salv Army, those may not be as expensive as one might think

[LarryW3]

I really like the idea of using metal funnels for this treat. If you shop around in your local auto parts store, you can find one that's made of stainless steel and about 2-3" at the top/large end. Snip the spout off about 1" from the funnel part and crimp the hole shut as close to the funnel as possible. Be sure the metal parts are very well cleaned, then spray-lubed prior to use. Use stiff wire (flux-free bronze welding rod?) to make the finish-baking stand and you're on your way. Looking at the pictures online, the paper/parchment liners should fit quite nicely. I'm going to get the funnels tomorrow and try these little gems ASAP!!

[romanapizzeriagroup]

Looking delicious.

[GRUBDUDE]

I did these two ways - one making my own cones (though I pre-baked them because I wanted them to stand up well), using flexible cardboard fashioned into a cone, and wrapped in heavy aluminum foil. Works very very well. The other way was using pre-made cones (for ice cream), the ones that are pale, like a wafer. They are basically tasteless, and once the savory ingredients are in there, you can't really tell anything may be weird with it. Great for experimentation.

[mikeasaurus]

That's really clever. Do you have any pictures of your creations?

[GRUBDUDE]

I don't have any photos of the molds themselves, (I'll stick that on the list, since it's better than buying them all the time!). but I do have a picture of the store-bought cones. It was several years ago and I haven't tried it again with the store-bought. With those, I definitely needed MORE filling, because it shrunk inside! A very bad photo, but it's available here:

http://www.grubdude.com/2012/07/04/layered-pizza-i...

[Cerasus]

I'm not really sure that drink cans coating makes the safe to use in the oven. Also aluminium in itself is not healthy at all.

[sergiorey]

And I love it! very tasty! I tried.

[yooper1019]

The real concern is that all beer and soda cans have a liner that contains BPA, which while is not hazardous under normal (chilled) conditions, will release when heated.

[mspaeth]

I agree. The liners are a form of plastic, who knows what additional gases and compounds in addition to BPA will get released when heated. Aluminum drink cans are not approved for food use when heated in this manner. This instructable is a cool idea though.

[yooper1019]

Many people that make beer butt chicken are exposing themselves to pretty nasty stuff.

[mspaeth]

Yooper, you talk about beer a lot :) Are you the Yooper from HBT?

[willyjoeshow]

In such a small amount I highly doubt there is a need to worry. However, if you are concerned about the coating then I would line the can with a little aluminum foil.

[ijkdenem]

do u think using glass bottles would work? cut the part where it becomes funnel-like and keep the cap on it and maybe it would work 2. prolly need 2 rig something 2 keep the bottle funnel things uprite thou.

[HassaanN]

very good

[CnuS]

i want to know how long cone pizza dove stay after baking and

how i need to preserve cone pizza dove after baking for long time.

plz send me details to my mail i.d ([e-mail])

thanks.

[spark master]

at a guess, cool very cold freeze place a disc of waxed paper inside the (on top of) cone top, then wrap in waxed paper. Moisture will collect on the paper , not the product, that is why a well done residing on a house uses tar paper or house wrap. Then wrap tightly in foil, freeze solid. Reheat in a 400 degree oven in stands used to make themfor say 8 mintes, use a thermometer center should be in the 165 range allow to cool MANGIA