Making Progress

I made some braided calzones during tax season, as can be seen below from the forms strewn about the back of the table. I think they turned out pretty well, and the same method could be used for strudel type dessert pastries if one used pie crust instead of pizza dough.

Here’s how the construction goes:

Make (or buy) one batch of pizza dough. (I used Emeril’s recipe, but substituted whole wheat flour for 1/3 of the total flour by mass).  Separate the dough into four parts. Use a rolling pin to roll each quarter into an oval about 3/16″ thick and two to three times as long as it is wide. Be sure to liberally cover your work surface and rolling pin with corn meal to prevent the crusts from sticking. Spread a little pizza sauce in the center of each:

Then top these sauced crusts with a mix of fillings. I used faux italian sausage (or rather italian style faux sausage), chopped onion and green peppers plus a few grinds of black pepper:

Grated mozzarella cheese completes the filling:

Now the fancy part! Cut laterally from the edge of the dough to the filling with a pair of kitchen shears at three or four places along the length of the calzone:

Kitchen shears really do make this job easier than it would be with a knife. If you don’t have a pair I highly recommend getting some. Now get a small bowl of water to moisten your fingers. Begin at the top of the calzone. Moisten the outside edge of each tab, and alternately fold down the left and right side tabs diagonally across the filling. When you get to the end just pinch the dough together and you should have something like this ready to bake:

Let this rest for about 15 minutes then use a pizza peel (well covered in corn meal of course) to load it onto a stone in the bottom of a 475°F oven. Bake for about 15 minutes. If you don’t have a peel and baking stone, you could use a parchment or silpat lined cookie sheet, but really it’s more fun with the peel and stone. I’d recommend pairing this meal with an American lager such as Yuengling Traditional Lager or Brooklyn Lager.

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This entry was posted on September 30, 2009 at 01:48 and is filed under Cooking, How To. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: baking, calzone, Cooking, Italian