I have been eyeballing garlic knot recipes for a few months now, and had yet to find one that would inspire me enough to test it out.  My main problem with them being – NOT enough garlic! Sprinkling some minced garlic onto of a baked piece of dough was not enticing enough to be worth the effort.  In my book, you may as well make garlic bread.  Less work and more garlic.

I was sitting around the other night examining my options for dinner which seemed to consist of leftover BBQ ribs and a ball of pizza dough that desperately needed to be used up, and figured that BBQ ribs and pizza seemed a bit much for one meal.  I came to the conclusion that I needed to use the pizza dough as some sort of side.  That in turn brought me back to garlic knots, but in order to circumvent the boredom of sprinkling minced garlic onto baked dough I decided to twist some pesto into the dough.  What I ended up with was fast, easy, delicious and garlicky.

Ingredients:

• 1 ball of Pizza Dough
• a few tbsp of Pesto
• 1 tbsp of Olive Oil
• some coarse Salt

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
3. Divide the dough into 10-12 pieces.
4. Use your hands to roll out each piece into a log.
5. Use a rolling pin to flatten each log.
6. Spread about 1/2 tsp of pesto down the middle of every flattened log of dough.
7. Fold the dough over to tuck in the pesto.
8. Lift the dough by each end, and twist the dough until it buckles into a twisted knot.
9. Arrange the knots onto the lined baking sheet.
10. Brush the tops of the knots with olive oil, and sprinkle with salt.
11. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until the dough is baked all of the way through.