Most people who install a wood fired pizza oven do so with dreams of crispy-crusted pizzas topped with flavorful sauces and gooey, bubbling cheese that’s been browned to perfection. What you’ll discover once you get to know your pizza oven is that it is great for cooking a wide range of delicious dishes, including today’s focus: the calzone.
Calzones are an Italian “folded pizza” of sorts traditionally made from salted bread dough and stuffed with ricotta and parmesan cheese, egg, and ham or salami. You can feel free, however, to be creative with the filling for your calzones—pretty much anything you can put on a pizza, you can put into a calzone.
Although calzones are made from dough that is rolled out more thinly than pizza dough, because of their thickness when folded over they need to be baked a bit slower and at a lower temperature than a pizza in order to cook through fully. The result is a crispy crusted, golden brown pocket of mouthwatering proportions. Here we’ll share a basic calzone recipe as well as a few substitutions you could make for interesting flavor profiles. Make sure you have a couple of bags of firewood handy to heat up your oven and give these a try!
Basic Calzones
Ingredients
Dough
- 500g of your favorite pizza dough
- Flour for dusting
- Egg to glaze the dough
- 2 tbsp. dried oregano
Filling
- 125g mozzarella cheese, grated
- 15g grated parmesan cheese
- 125g salami, roughly chopped
- 2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
- 500ml of your favorite thick tomato pasta sauce
Method
- Make sure your wood fired pizza oven has only a small flame or only embers. Divide the pizza dough into 4 portions. Roll each portion out into a 15cm circle.
- In a mixing bowl combine the ricotta, mozzarella, parmesan, and salami. Spoon the mixture evenly over one half of each round of dough. Make sure to leave a 2cm border, as you will need to seal the dough after folding it over.
- Fold the empty side of the calzone over the side with the sauce and cheese. Press the edges to seal the two sides, or press a fork along the border to seal.
- Brush the tops of the calzones with the egg and sprinkle with oregano. Cut a small hole in the center of each calzone. Dust a bit of flour in your oven, place calzones inside, and bake for 5-10 minutes, or until the tops of the calzones are golden and you can see the sauce and cheese bubbling through the holes you cut. Exact cooking time will depend on the heat of your oven.
Flavour Variations
Lamb Sausage
Swap the salami for lamb sausage, leave out the tomato sauce and add in a sliced and grilled red onion, 2 cups of sautéed cremini mushrooms, and a sprinkling of rosemary.
Spinach and Feta
Replace the meat and tomato sauce with 6 cups of spinach sautéed with minced garlic and switch the cheeses for 150g of ricotta cheese and 50g of feta cheese.