Copycat Bandera Bread (Because $14.99 Is Criminal)
If you grew up or spent any time in Canada there is a non-zero chance that you’ve eaten at a Boston Pizza. The draw of Boston Pizza is that you can walk into one anywhere in the country, and order the same thing, and you get exactly the same experience no matter what.
When we were kids growing up in small town Canada, it was the fanciest restaurant in town, so it was always a great time when we would go there. You get your pepperoni pizza or spaghetti, you get the virgin Shirley Temple to drink, then you get worms and dirt as a dessert (if you were good), and a free kids chocolate chip cookie to top the whole night off. Even the decor was quaint and unique.
Brittany and her siblings, circa early 2000s at Boston Pizza. This photo was taken on a disposable camera.
Mediocre Note: We tried so hard to find photographic evidence that there was an individually packaged cookie with Lionel’s huge face on it. We can’t find it. We promise that we’re not Schizo posting rn. (It’s not this one.)
But as with most things, c a p i t a l i s m came and ruined everything. Now everything is corporate, soulless, and hyper expensive.
Which brings us to the whole point of this post. Not long ago, Trevor decided to stop in at a BPs to treat himself to dinner as he hadn’t been in a while. Imagine his shock when a meal consisting of banderabandera bread, chicken fingers and fries, and one (1) Diet Pepsi ended up costing $45 CAD.
That is egregious and an affront to God himself. So we decided that we can absolutely do better. There are so many different items to choose from, but we decided that we wanted to recreate a classic: bandera bread.
Bandera Bread
What even is bandera bread? At its core, it’s a cheese pizza sans tomato sauce. Instead of pizza sauce there is Italian dressing and, maybe, garlic butter.
Bandera bread from Boston Pizza.
But the internet is divided: does bandera bread have garlic butter on it, or not? This reddit post has multiple commenters saying to use garlic butter, but many bandera bread copycat recipes don’t include it. So we did what we do best and made bandera bread both ways so you don’t have to. 🕵️♀️ The result: the garlic butter version was more delicious than the sans garlic bread version. (Duh.)
Ingredients:
250g pizza dough*
20g garlic butter**
80-100g shredded mozzarella cheese (measure with your heart)
2-3 tbsp grated parmesan cheese (again, measure with your heart)
2-3 tbsp Zesty Italian dressing***
1sp Italian seasoning
*We were feeling particularly lazy that day so we bought fresh dough from the Italian Center. But of course, you can make your own pizza dough.
**You can make your own, but we got some from the bakery at the grocery store near us. We figured it help us taste more like BPs by using mass produced garlic butter that comes in a giant plastic bucket.
***We bought both Kraft Zesty Italian and Golden Italian dressing and decided that they probably used Zesty Italian. It has more of the red flakes in it, which are notably present on bandera bread. (And we also just like it more, so maybe we’re also a bit biased.)
Preheat your oven to 550°F to emulate the closest you can get to a pizza oven. (Even though we heavily suspect they aren’t using real pizza ovens in Boston Pizza)
Once up to temperature, place an 8 inch cast iron pan in the oven with a little bit of oil in it for one minute to bring the pan up to temperature.
Take the pan out and add a little extra oil to it. The idea is that you want the bottom of the crust to fry in the pan a little bit.
Using your hands, make your pizza dough into a round shape about the same size as a cast iron pan.
Place it in the pan and parbake it for one minute.
Take it out of the oven, it should look like the dough is cooked-ish. Spread garlic butter all over it, then your zesty Italian dressing, Italian seasoning, mozzarella, and parmesan cheese in that order.
Pop it back into the oven and turn on the light — you’ll want to watch to make sure your cheese doesn’t burn. We cooked ours for ~10 minutes.
Take it out, let it cool in the pan for about 5 minutes, and then transfer it to a cutting board to slice into pieces. Serve with Santa Fe dipping sauce (recipe below!)
We made two batches of bandera bread, and the first time we did not parbake the crust. It still turned out fine, but by letting it cook for a bit without the toppings you can get a crispier crust! If you don’t have a cast iron pan, you can use a non-stick pan.
So, so good.
“Our bodies cannot handle this much bread and cheese anymore.”
Santa Fe Dipping Sauce
No order of Bandera Pizza bread is complete without Santa Fe dip. What is Santa Fe dip? A mixture of ranch and salsa with some hot sauce. What about that makes it related to a city in New Mexico? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We did copious amounts of research (AKA reading through a few Reddit threads) and landed on roughly equal parts salsa and ranch (60/40 salsa to ranch). The biggest discrepancy from the former BPs line cooks on Reddit is whether or not the heat and spice comes from tabasco sauce or from sriracha.
Using a very scientific approach (making both and tasting it 😆) we both agreed that using tabasco was the best. Sriracha isn’t bad per se, but Tabasco sauce just works better and is closer to the taste of the actual Santa Fe dip. We don’t know what the reddit commenters were on, but it was very obviously Tabasco that was being used.
Ingredients:
1 tbsp ranch dressing*
1 tbsp + 1 tsp chunky salsa**
2-4 drops of tabasco sauce to taste
*We used Hidden Valley ranch on the day of cooking and it worked out well. Just do not use Kraft ranch dressing. It’s nasty.
**We used Pace chunky salsa. You do you. Stick with a mass-produced salsa vs homemade for that true BPs feel.
Combine everything into a bowl. You’ll end up with roughly the same amount of Santa Fe dip that you would get at BPs with an order of bandera bread. Feel free to scale that up or down as required (the main thing is that you hit the 60/40 salsa to ranch ratio. Add Tabasco sauce until there’s a little kick, and you can taste the vinegar, but it’s not burning your mouth).
Eating Out is Expensive, Yo
You know it, we know it, but when you sit down at a restaurant you still get sticker shock when you see the prices on the menu.
Boston Pizza charges $14.99 for an 8” bandera bread (which comes with a tiny container of dip). Did we make it cheaper?
Per Portion
Store Bought Dough = $2.49*
Mozzarella Cheese = $1.99
Parmesan Cheese = $0.25
Garlic Butter = $0.50
Zesty Italian Dressing = $0.10
Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing = $0.17
Pace Chunky Salsa = $0.07
Tabasco Sauce = $0.01
Total cost = $5.58
Giving a big middle finger to corporate chain restaurants🖕 = priceless.
(Every time someone orders bandera bread at Boston Pizza, Jim Treliving sits on his yacht and laughs.)
*Obviously this would be much cheaper if, you know, you made your own dough. Flour and yeast are cheap! It’d probably be closer to $3.50 if we made our own dough.
$14.99 for some cheese and dough. Bruh.
Did We Nail It?
Almost. We were very close with our re-creation. If we make it again, we’d make our own pizza dough that has more sugar and salt in it. We’d also consider using some sort of pie weight on top of the dough for the initial par bake. (One of the classic features of bandera bread is how flat it is.)
What classic BPs dish should we make next — cactus cuts or Thai chili bites? Let us know in the comments below!