Tuesday, July 21, 2009

friday night eats

Last week m put in a request that I make a steak and cheese calzone for dinner one night.

I bought the pizza dough from Whole Foods (I still haven't tried making my own pizza dough. I've had some referrals to good recipes to try, but it breaks my heart to think of wasting all that flour if I got it wrong. So I just buy my dough when I can.)


I'm still working out the kinks with my calzones. They are huge! And the bread to guts ratio is a bit off. I think my problem is that I'm being lazy. I really ought to bust out the flour and rolling pin and roll the dough out so that it's even. Maybe cut it to size so I can make two smaller sized calzones and then fill with gooey goodness to bake.

This was a very good calzone despite the ratio mishap. I'll be buying the dough from that Whole Foods again.

A few more notes about my calzones:
I pan-sear the beef whole and then slice it. This way the meat stays tender and doesn't get chewy from overcooking. It'll still be cooking from the heat of itself well after I take it off the pan. And then there's additional cooking time/heat from being inside a hot oven. I find that the pan-searing keeps the meat tender every time.

I take the dough out of the fridge and let it sit out at room temperature for at least 20 minutes. It gives the dough a chance to rest and do a little rising.

In the future I'll flour and roll out the dough so that my calzones have a better distribution of bread to innards.

I heat up my pizza stone while the dough is resting at room temperature. The heat keeps the dough from sticking too much to the pizza stone. And I always use a pizza stone. The dough cooks wonderfully on it.

Even though m will argue with me on this one, I always keep the ingredients for my steak and cheese calzone to just steak and cheese. He claims I used pizza sauce in it once, but I claim that it must have been his girlfriend's calzone he's talking about.