Homemade Calzones!

As I said before, last week was a nonstop calzone craving for me. I was super busy all week, and Sam and I planned on spending Saturday at his house to relax after a long week and a rough night at work. The mental plotting of the calzone I was going to make on Saturday is just about the only thing that got me through the end of the week.

Most of our recent experience with calzones comes from D.P. Dough, a calzone delivery place in Amherst that Sam and I splurge on from time to time. D.P. Dough has its downsides, though, all of which apply to all of the delivery places in the area: the food is dense, it's heavy, and you can never finish it all unless you've got one hell of an appetite. Every time I get one of their calzones, half of it sits in my fridge for a week before I throw it away. And, although they have a lot of options in addition to the custom-calzone option, they don't offer all of the ingredients that I've been craving.

So we went to Stop & Shop. Friday was pay day, so I was ready to splurge on all the best fillings I wanted. It was all planned out in my brain: I wanted spinach, broccoli, tomato, and goat cheese. Sam got black olives, mushrooms, and shredded mozzarella. Vegetables are generally cheap, and a bag of pizza dough was only $2.30. The most expensive thing was my goat cheese, but what can I say? Sometimes I have expensive taste.

The great thing about calzones is you can literally put whatever you want in them. There are no limits. You don't have to approach it like you would approach a traditional pizza. You could stuff a calzone full of chocolate and peanut butter and -- I'm going to try that. The idea of a dessert calzone is not uncommon. D.P. Dough offers one on their menu, stuffed with apples and cinnamon to be dipped in a glaze sauce. If you can have a dessert calzone, why rule out the idea of a dessert pizza? I suppose the world is still warming up to the idea.

The first thing we did to prepare our calzone was take care of washing and chopping the vegetables. I used cherry tomatoes, which I just sliced in half vertically (slicing them through their width caused them to sqeeze a little and they lost their juices to the cutting board). The broccoli was cut normally. I ripped up the bigger pieces of spinach. We set the dough in a bowl with some flower to knead it a little before separating it into two chunks for us to work with on our own. After forcing my dough to remain flat and maintain the right shape, I spread goat cheese over all of it. I chose to use spreadable cheese instead of crumbles because a) it was cheaper and b) I wanted there to be even layers of cheese when the calzone came out of the oven. After spreading the cheese, I started throwing my vegetable fillings onto one half of the dough. Sam and I both thought that I was overstuffing, but when my calzone came out of the oven some of the vegetables seemed to have shrunk. After placing all of the toppings, I folded the rest of the dough over and pinched the thing shut. Then I helped Sam with his and we put them in the oven at 475 degrees for 15 minutes. (Bake them on the middle shelf of the oven -- I put mine on the bottom and the underside of my calzone got a little burnt.)

When our calzones came out of the oven, we were afraid; they were extremely hard. We thought we'd burned them and that our dinner was ruined. Fortunately, as we sliced them in two, watched the steam escape from their cavernous interiors, drooled and took our first bites, we quickly became unafraid: they were perfect. The outside seemed hard to us at first, but the inside was soft and cooked to perfection. Sam dipped his calzone in Ragu marinara sauce that he added crushed red pepper, oregano, and red wine to.

This calzone was probably the greatest culinary success I have ever had. If I had more time, I would have loved to make the dough myself. This was the first time since I started learning how to cook that I experienced a sense of longing after devouring the calzone. An hour after eating it, I turned to Sam and said, "I miss that calzone." I would make another, bigger one right now if I could.

Problems I ran into
None! Another easy one. As long as the dough has risen enough prior to using it, this is extremely simple and extremely difficult to screw up.