Was there any day more exciting in primary school than lunch order day? Everyone would turn up in the morning with their order scrawled on a brown paper bag, the couple of coins required to pay for it taped to the front. And if you were the chosen one that week you would get to be the hero who carried the shopping basket full of your classmates brown paper dreams down to the canteen. Later in the day you’d carry those same bags back packed to the brim with everyone’s favourite steaming hot junk food. Meat pies, chicken nuggets and sausage rolls were always common picks. But another one of my favourites was the good old pizza pocket. What was yours?

The thing about childhood memories is that they glisten so wonderfully in our minds, but attempts to relive them as adults usually end in disappointment. Every time we’ve bought pizza pockets as an adult it’s usually followed by a, “These used to be so much nicer,” comment. More likely, they were never quite amazing but we were much more easily impressed as children. So when the pizza pocket craving hit recently rather than re-living that disappointment again I decided to make my own!

The first step naturally has to be making the pizza dough. If you have a favourite recipe you can definitely stick to that. This one is a very basic and simple dough. The most important step of course is proofing the yeast. Most dried yeasts are fine added straight to the flour mixture, bit I wanna know its alive before I go to all that effort.

This year I finally bought myself a stand mixer and I love how much hands on time this guy saves me. I let the mixer bring the dough together and do the initial kneading, but I still prefer to knead by hand towards the end. You feel when the dough becomes the right consistency and elasticity. After leaving it to rise for an hour you should end up with a beautiful bowl of dough.

While that’s happening you’ll want to grab your favourite pizza ingredients. My go-to order was always a hawiian pizza pocket so I had to make some. I divided the dough into 6 and roughly rolled them out.

It’s not strictly necessary to do so, but I used a small bowl to form the pizza pockets. It gives me a really good idea of exactly how much filling I’m gonna get in there before attempting to close it over. Then I smother it all with a good layer of tomato paste.

Half of the pizza pockets I filled with those old-fashioned Hawaiian pizza toppings. The other three I filled with the ham, olives, capsicum and haloumi. There’s no rules here. If you like it on your pizza, shove it in your pizza pocket!

Once they’re filled you can stretch and pinch the edges of your dough together.

I placed them seam-side down onto a baking tray and scored the dough. If you’re making a few different flavours (and especially if it matters to the people eating them) its a good idea here to score them with different patterns so you can tell them apart.

A little milk wash and a sprinkle of parsley give these guys a splash of colour.

A short time in the oven and the smell of pizza dough will be wafting through the kitchen.

Instead of the mouthful of chewy dough and scant ingredients the commercial products leave me with, I ended up with a crispy, fresh pizza pocket much closer to my rose-coloured childhood memories.

Hawaiian is still my favourite though. By the time all the cheese melted through the pizza pocket it wasn’t as stuffed as the others so maybe next time I’ll see if I can squeeze in more. But damn I love the sweetness of the pineapple and no one will convince me pineapple isn’t godly on pizza.

Lets get you started on your very own!