Balls of Dough! (Pizza Express Dough Balls)

Member Name: i_am_joy

Product:	Pizza Express Dough Balls
Date:	09/05/09 (170 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The dough balls taste delicious, easy to prepare, filling

Disadvantages: High in both calories and fat, the dip is too much like a big knob of butter

I have only fairly recently discovered the joys of Dough Balls, I tried them in an Italian restaurant in London and became hooked from the very first mouthful. When I saw that Tesco sell chilled dough balls made by Pizza Express I decided to buy a box as a treat for myself and my granddaughters' with a pizza and some garlic bread.

They are very tasty indeed, although I wasn't overly fond of the garlic and herb butter that was served with them.

The balls are a nice size, just right to be eaten in two mouthfuls and you get sixteen dough balls in each box which seems about right to me considering the size portion I had received in the Italian Restaurant. Shared between three of us we ended up with five balls each, obviously, and eagle eyed readers will realise that three doesn't go into sixteen - blame my very naughty cat who deliberately swiped one onto the floor as I was putting them onto plates!

They are lovely, not quite as good as those I had eaten in London but for a 'ready to cook' product I think they are excellent. The balls turn a golden brown during cooking and looked very appetising indeed, I adore the texture of them as the outside is slightly glossy and a little bit crunchy yet when I bite through each ball the inside is a much lighter consistency and fairly fluffy. I said fairly fluffy as being a good thing as because this is basically just pizza dough shaped into balls you wouldn't exactly expect them to be overly soft and fluffy.

The idea of the dip is to serve this cold and the dough balls will soak up the flavours when dipped in. This does work if I'm honest, but the dip has the appearance and texture of a lump of butter and I found they made the overall eating experience rather too greasy and buttery. The dough balls do melt the butter nicely and if you don't mind greasy and oily food then I'm sure you'll love the combination, but personally I'd rather have seen a different type of dip to keep the fat content down.

I must admit that the flavour of the dip does go very well with the blandness of the dough balls. It's very strong in garlic flavouring and the herbiness blends well with this strength of flavour, it's simply the butter-like consistency that puts me off as I'm not one for huge lumps of butter on anything!

While I was aware that the dip was going to be rather high in fat I was surprised that the dry dough balls are equally bad for my waistline, half a pack (eight balls) contains 365 calories and half a pot of the dip comes in at almost 250 calories and 6g of fat. I find these figures rather high for what is, in essence, a snack - it doesn't bear thinking about how many calories I consumed with the pizza and garlic bread on top, and we'll not mention the huge tub of ice cream we shared afterwards!

Summary: A tasty accompaniment to pizza.