Erin and I were making pizzas for dinner the other day and she said, “Oh, we should use the extra dough to make calzones for lunch tomorrow.” And when I replied, all offhand-like, “Sure, that sounds good. I’ve never had one before,” there was this long silence, and I looked over to see Erin staring at me like I had just burst out into a rousing rendition of “Don’t Rain On My Parade.”
So apparently never having eaten a calzone is kind of strange. And apparently it’s extremely strange for someone who spent the bulk of her life living in various New York City apartments, all of which were located approximately ten feet away from a pizza place (or three).
(If we’re being totally honest here, I’m not even sure I could have told you what a calzone looks like. I had a vague impression of it being lumpy and bready with…something or another inside, but I think that’s also a decent description of a gyro, a.k.a. another thing that I couldn’t have described very well even upon pain of death until five minutes ago, when I googled it. And since we’re tangentially on the topic of gyros, I also feel that it’s important to let you know that up until the age of twelve I confused the word “gyro” with the word “orgy,” which means that I had an extremely skewed interpretation of that photo of a woman eating a meat-filled sandwichy-thing that’s posted on the door of every Italian to-go place in New York.)
Anyway, we fixed the Jordan-has-never-eaten-a-calzone problem the very next day.
And? It turns out calzones are really easy to make. And really good. And it’s super weird that I only just discovered this.
So you start by flouring your work surface, and then forming your (store-bought, in my case) dough into a circle. Then you cut it into 8 triangles, a la the (unintentionally dramatic and Dexter-ish) photo above.
Next, you pull and stretch each little triangle of dough for ever and ever (or maybe two minutes, but if feels like forever and ever because stretching dough is boring) into a nice little oval shape.
Then get out your fillings. We went with the basics: tomato, mozzarella and basil (mostly because those are three things that I always have in my refrigerator and when you have three tiny children in your house you only go to the supermarket when you absolutely have to or when you want wine).
Then you fill your calzones. But only halfway, because look!
Now we’re making a little package.
This part is important: use a fork to press down on the edges of the calzone. It’s important because this makes them look all fancy and impressive, but also because this is the best way (according to Erin, at least; I obviously have no idea what I’m talking about here) to get the edges golden and a little crunchy rather than super-doughy.
Now – if you are as bad at stretching dough as I am – what you have sitting in front of you will strongly resemble an amoeba.
Yum!
(Cut a little slit in the top to let steam out, and sprinkle over a bit of Maldon salt.)
One oiled baking sheet and about fifteen minutes in a 425F oven later, and…
Ta daaaaaa.
It still looks like an amoeba, but a much more delicious one.
(Serve with a little tomato sauce on the side, for dipping.)
