Binging with Babish: Calzones from Seinfeld

it's a calzone sir how's all huh yeah let's see it passed it on down let's get a little look at that big stein wants a little taste come on come on pass it down here that's a good boy okay let's do a what's in this thing cheese pepperoni eggplant huh that's a hell of a thing all right all right back to business here you go very good very good excellent excellent little gaozong you got the echo stand up okay little jealous all right Go Go hey what's up guys welcome back to binging with babish where this week we're taking a look at the calzones from Seinfeld to all fans of Parks and Rec do not worry I will be exploring the low-cal calzone Zone in a future episode but before we do anything I want to talk about one thing or rather two things pizza stones - pizza stones one placed on the bottom rack of your oven the other on the top or even better a pizza steel on the bottom and a pizza stone on top creates a little oven within your oven blasting your pizza or calzone with extra radiative heat from both the top and bottom when the time comes we're gonna preheat these in a maxed-out oven for one hour before using but well before then we need to start making our dough so into the bowl stand mixer goes 360 milliliters of tepid water to which we're gonna add about 3 grams of active dry yeast or about 1 teaspoon and 2 grams are about half a teaspoon of plain white sugar this will be a nice little snack for our yeast while we let it bloom for 10 minutes before adding 600 grams of bread flour giving our dough a hydration of about 60% you can use all-purpose flour but I've found that it needs a higher hydration more like 65 70 % and bread flour just produces a better texture in the final product anyway you'll notice that added about 6 grams or 1 teaspoon of kosher salt to the flour before kneading on medium speed for about 5 minutes after which time we should have a tacky supple dough which we are going to pre divide into our desired portions then we are stretching each divided portion into a taut ball the rounder and more taut it is the easy our job is going to be later on then we're going to engage in a practice employed by many New York pizza shops which is making the dough ahead of time and allowing it to cold ferment in the fridge these quarter recipes of the dough are perfect for individual pizzas but for the calzone we need a double portion of dough since it is effectively a double pizza double pizza double pizza stones double dipping coincidence I don't think so into a well oiled Bowl go covered with plastic wrap and refrigerate it for three days cold fermentation accomplishes a number of things all of which I will illustrate later on for now we got to make it quick pizza sauce we've done this a number of times in the show so I'm just gonna breeze through it into the jar of a blender goes a 28-ounce can of san marzano tomatoes half the small chopped onion 2 cloves of garlic little shakes each of the dried oregano dried basil and crushed red pepper flake if you want a little heat then we're hitting this mixture with one second pulses until it is relatively smooth blasting it on high speed would incorporate air bubbles into the sauce which is a bad thing unless you like orange pizza sauce we're also gonna season it with a little bit of kosher salt and freshly ground pepper taste for seasoning of course and then if all you're making is pizza you're pretty much ready to go I personally like my pizza sauce to do its cooking in the oven but for the sauce that we're serving with the calzone I want to cook it on the stovetop for about 30 minutes maybe it was a little splash of water to prevent it from getting too thick since we're just gonna be dipping our calzone in if we want to cook off some of that raw tomato flavor and let it get a little sweet set that aside because now I'm going to demonstrate why cold fermenting is so important here we have the same recipe of that pizza dough which I just made fresh and did not allow to cold ferment just loud to proof at room temperature for two hours I'm going to start by generously flowering both it and my work surface and then starting to roll it out mark Iacono taught me this method where you roll out two ends of it leaving a sort of mound of unrolled dough in the middle which you can then rotate and roll from the center thank goodness for visual aids because my description of that was pretty confusing we're then gonna pass the dough repeatedly over our knuckles until gravity stretches it out to about a 10-inch round and now to finalize our pie we need to prep our pizza peel dusting it with a little bit of coarsely ground cornmeal which is going to allow our pizza to slide off it and into the oven with ease take care of any final shaping and stretching and then it's time to sauce and cheese that's OP the pie goes a few generous dollops of our raw tomato sauce which we're gonna spread almost all the way to the edges then I'm gonna hit this guy with some Findley sliced full fat fresh mozzarella our oven has been preheating at 550 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour so this pizzas gonna cook really quickly mine came out like this in about five minutes and you might notice that it's pretty thin and unimpressive it's flat there's no blistering or bubbling one might even call it cracker like the double stone setup did a great job of charring the bottom just like a real pizza place but let's see what happens when we use our cold for doh at this point more gluten has developed which is going to improve the dough's texture it has lightly fermented which is going to improve its flavor and as you can see the yeast has been much more active creating a much better rise in the crests and giving us those nice bubbles and charred spots that we've come to expect from pizzeria pizza you can definitely make quick pizza dough without fermenting just triple-b east in the recipe and don't expect it to look so nice or taste so good anyway now that we've got our pizza dough down it's time to don't know juice it's time to tackle our calzone George specifies three different fillings one of which is eggplants which I'm going to start by slicing and placing on a rack set and rimmed baking sheet and lightly salting both sides with kosher salt this is not only going to season our eggplant it's going to make it weep bitter tears literally after about 30 minutes you will notice a conspicuous brown liquid has materialized atop your eggplant slices we're just gonna dab that off with a paper towel maybe give the paper towel a little taste to prove that it is in fact bitter it is as a little dramatic though so tone it back next time and make sure you dab both the sides of the eggplant next I'm gonna do what I should have done before and line my sheet pan with aluminum foil for easier cleanup pop the rack back on top and get ready to roast first and the season these guys a little bit of freshly ground black pepper and a few healthy glugs of olive oil which is gonna help both flavor and coloring then these fellows are headed into a corner degree fahrenheit oven for 20 to 25 minutes until they're nicely browned and soft set them aside to cool off a bit and then they're ready for a litany of roasted eggplant applications including but not limited to calzone filling a little worried about long strands of eggplant slipping out of my calzone though so I'm gonna go ahead and chop these into more manageable pieces and at long last we are ready to make some folded in half pizza we've got our cold fermented dough here that we're gonna let sit at room temperature for two hours or until it has doubled in size then doing our best to maintain its roundness we're going to retrieve it from the bowl coated liberally with flour on both sides and then roll it out using the same method as before and remember that this is double the dough the previous individual pizzas so it's going to be considerably larger when used the same knuckle over knuckle method to stretch it at about as wide as we can get it after all New York pizzerias are known for many things small calzones are not one of them now on the interior half of the circle we're going to start spreading a whole bunch of high-quality ricotta making sure to leave a two to three inch gap on the outside next up we are singling that with some pepperonis topping our pepperonis with our chopped roasted eggplant and then topping that with just a whole lot of thinly sliced fresh mozzarella cheese and then it's time to turn our toppings into fillings fold the dough right over trying to drape instead of stretch and then we're going to seal this whole affair shut by simply using a pizza cutter to trim off the excess no egg wash no butter no muss no fuss teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pizza cutter optional we're just gonna pinch the edge shut a little bit to make sure that it's totally sealed I'm gonna tuck in the calzone tips a little bit just to make sure that it fits on my pizza peel which I am of course going to dust with coarsely ground cornmeal place the calzone on top make any last-minute adjustments I'm going to turn it around so the thicker part is facing the hotter part of my oven and then it's time to shimmy this guy betwixt our two stones for what could take anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes depending on your oven hotness then we're going to immediately slice this guy in half which prevents the steam from making the crust soggy from the inside out and take a look at a seriously cheesy calzone cross-section marred only by the buildup of liquid you can see around the bottom of the zone the calzone while still absolutely delicious has fallen victim to over moist artisanal fillings and while it is an obvious and undisputed member of the clean plate Club the Milky Way or whatever it is is bumming me out something fierce so let's see if we can't take a few simple steps to reduce the moisture inside our zone that as a sentence does not sound great first we're gonna drain some way out of the ricotta by lining a sieve with four layers of cheesecloth setting that whole affair in a bowl dumping in the ricotta covering with plastic wrap and draining over at night alternately you could weigh it down with something heavy like a jar and let that squeeze the moisture out of the ricotta for 20 to 30 minutes next up I'm going to use shredded full fat low moisture mozzarella lay down a little insulative layer on the thinner side of the dough round take note that this plastic wrap really loves cheesecloth take a look at our bouncy that's not much but it's a few tablespoons that won't end up in our calzone and continue as before layering toppings folding the whole thing closed sealing show that it's a cutter and dumping the whole thing into our oven that's been maxed out and preheating for one hour and that is looking just about awesome I'm gonna bust out the Mezzaluna this time so I look like an adults cutting open my giant pizza pocket and was relieved to see right away that our annoys your problems were known or is a bit of doming going on on the inside of the calzone but for the most part we've reached the apex of the art form here I've had a lot of pizza and calzones recently so I'm gonna cut this into four Z's for sharesies briefly admire the molten cheese inferno before using it immediately to burn my mouth the bottoms got a little bit of char but I'm actually into that and the whole thing is just awesome go make one now or rather in three days sorry about that [Music]

Channel: Babish Culinary Universe

Views: 7,799,639

Rating: 4.9495983 out of 5

Keywords: calzones, pizza, dough, ferment, pizza dough, how to make pizza, how to make pizza dough, new york style pizza, new york pizza, calzone recipe, how to make calzones, sauce, cheese, pepperoni, eggplant, roasted, roasted eggplant, binging with babish, cooking with babish, babbish, how to make calzone at home, how to make calzones from scratch, eggplant calzone seinfeld, eggplant calzone, seinfeld calzone, calzone seinfeld, pear qwerty horse, pepperoni calzone, pepperoni calzone recipe

Id: zWuWrdaYMlY

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/YouCantHackTheGibson]

My wife thinks I'm crazy for having a pizza steel AND a pizza stone, but you guys understand me. It's necessary.

[u/longleaf1]

Babish help I've got too much moisture in my zone

[u/[deleted]]

Would cutting air vents on top the calzone help with steam and moisture?

[u/masbetter]

Ben Wyatt approves

[u/Paula-Abdul-Jabbar]

I was typing “Are we gonna see the low-cal calzone?” as I was watching and my question was quickly answered by a mind-reading Babish.

[u/Semper-Fido]

...I have never thought about that method for creating my own pizza oven. Time to research pizza steel...

[u/Quesodealer]

Gotta say, of all his creations, I'd say this one's on the less appetizing side. Not to say it doesn't look delicious, you can't go wrong with bread, cheese, and tomato sauce, but the crust looks pale and dry which really kills it imo.

[u/5tormwolf92]

I would love to eat one now, here is some money.

dumps a ton of pennies on the counter

[u/Woefinder]

"maxed out oven"

So I assume thats 500/550? I ask because I know people have hacked the cleaning cycle lock so they can get into their 800 degree oven and thats closer to where some true pizza ovens lie.