We usually make at least one pizza for our monthly meal swap and for January, I decided to try making calzones! I'd never made them before but assumed they would be fairly easy as it really is just an inverted pizza. Typically, when we make a homemade pizza I would use the bread machine to prepare a nice thick dough but I knew this would not be as good for calzones. So I searched around for a calzone recipe and found one here How To Make Calzones which linked me to a thin crust dough for pizzas. I decided to stick with traditional pizza toppings (green pepper, mushrooms, onions and pepperoni) for this round but would consider attempting other variations in the future. I initially made up three batches of dough and let it rise for several hours. Each dough is supposed to make 6 large calzones or 8 smaller ones. One batch of my dough seemed to remain quite tough, so I chucked it and just made two batches to sample. In my next round, I tripled the recipe to make three batches of dough and this worked out quite well. I found that cooking the calzones as per the recipe left them a little too brown and overdone so I reduced the cooking time for subsequent batches. I'd also used a marinara sauce that was a little too watery for the first batch so I switched to a thicker spaghetti sauce for the rest. I would say the amount of dough made was correct, I made 6 large calzones with each dough. I put the sauce on first, followed by the toppings and cheese and then folded them over. I used a fork to try to seal the sides (some leaked anyway) and made slits with a knife to release some of the heat. I cooked for 10 minutes on about 425 degrees and then moved them to a lower rack and cooked for another 10 minutes - this seemed just about right. Our first sample tasted quite good and I look forward to making them again and trying some other toppings inside!
