Calzone Recipe - How to Make a Calzone - Ham and Cheese Stuffed Pizza Bread

hello this is chef john from food wishes comm with how to make a calzone that's right we're finally gonna do calzone one of the most requested recipes we haven't gotten to yet and before we get started I probably should mention I'm more of a pizza guy so I've actually only made calzone a handful of times but despite that I do consider myself somewhat of an expert because I'm on the Internet so I am looking forward to passing along all my expertise for what really is a shockingly simple recipe so let's go ahead get started and first up a little tip about mozzarella cheese if you are using fresh mozzarella which I highly recommend what we're going to want to do is slice it nice and thin and put it on a paper towel to kind of wick away that excess moisture and by the way if you're using the mozzarella from the supermarket that looks and feels like a white rubber ball you don't have to do this so that's good I guess and you know what I just realized I got a little too much here that's better and once that set we can move on to the dough so for one single calzone you're going to need 6 ounces of pizza dough which is exactly 1/4 of our wolfgang puck inspired pizza dough recipe which is the one I'm recommending here and I'll tell you why on the blog so we'll put that down on a well floured surface and we'll sprinkle a little more over the top and as usual we only want to use enough flour so the dough doesn't stick so if it does seem like you've put too much down like it did to me here brush some away and then all we're going to do is flatten that dough out into some sort of round shape at that point I'm going to switch to a rolling pin and roll this out to about 8 or 9 inches wide and I do like the rolling pin for this but if you are an accomplished pizza dough stretcher or spinner go ahead do your thing hopefully we're all going to get to the same place which like I said is about an 8 or 9 inch round piece of dough about an eighth of an inch thick and unlike if we were making pizza we really don't want the dough on the edges any thicker than the dough on the inside so what I like to do when I have the right size I'll take my rolling pin and just kind of go around flattening out those edges just a little bit and hopefully that will make sense when you see how we fold this up and then once our dough has been prepped we'll start laying down our ingredients and we're going to start with the first of two kinds of hams I'm going to lay down a couple slices of prosciutto you can use prosciutto which is the same thing and we're just going to lay our fillings down on half the dough be sure to leave about an inch of plain dough around the edge so we'll lay down a couple slices of prosciutto followed by the first two two cheese's which would be summer got also referred to more commonly as ricotta and don't be stingy here this is the main ingredients and by the way because I'm kind of fancy I'm using an incredibly delicious local sheep's milk ricotta which is just amazing and by the way that's a good tip because there's only a few ingredients in this we're going to want to use the highest quality possible-- so we will spoon down our ricotta and then before we add the other hand the other cheese what we'll do is we'll season this up a little bit with some freshly ground black pepper and then a little B of C and if you're new around here that just means a little bit of cayenne and then once that's been seasoned we will top our coated with the second type of ham which is just plain old regular ham that I diced up so really any kind of smoked deli style ham will work here so we'll place over some ham again being careful we have a border of plain dough going around the edge and then once the ham is placed down we can finish this off with our mozzarella which should be nicely drained by now and that is going to be it for the filling and what we have here is my take on a very traditional calzone but it should be painfully obvious you could stuff this with whatever you want you are the Al Capone of your calzone sometimes I have to add a syllable for those to work and even then but anyway no matter what you fill this with once you're done this is how we're going to fold it up so the first thing I think we should do is take a damp finger tip I'm just dipping it into a little water and I do like to go around and kind of moisten the edge of that dough because depending on how long it took you to fill this the surface of that dough may have dried out a little bit and we want to make sure those two layers of dough stick really well together so by dabbing that with a tiny bit of water we're going to make it a little bit sticky which will help it seal and then once that's been accomplished we will grab our dough and fold that over the top kind of stretching it just past our filling just to where our plain border of dough starts and we'll kind of tap that down with our fingers just to keep it in place and then what we'll do and this is what really seals this together will take that extra dough will start folding it over going around kind of crimping it like this and because we did leave ourselves with enough plain dough by the time we worked our way from one end to the other we should have a very strong and secure seal and by the way don't worry about any kind of design around the edge no matter how you've done it it's going to look amazing once it bakes so that should help you relax a little bit and if this point we can transfer that onto our baking sheet but before we do I want to sprinkle down a little cornmeal that's going to help keep this from sticking as well as provide some textural interest to the bottom crust so we'll do a little bit of cornmeal which brings us to the most terrifying part of the whole procedure transferring this out to the pan because you're going to be afraid it's going to fall part but it won't assuming that this is not stuck to the table so you should probably check for that but assuming it's not stuck we're just going to grab that with both hands confidently and quickly transfer it onto our sheet pan and I said confidently do not hesitate a calzone can sense fear and once that's been successfully transferred to our pan we're going to need to take the tip of a knife and make some air vents especially if you're using a fresh mozzarella like we did because there's going to be a lot of moisture in there which means a lot of steam and if that doesn't vent up through these holes at the top who knows where that's going to come out but you can be sure won't be in a good spot so I'm going to make three holes on the top like you see here and then once our holes are made we'll go ahead and paint this with a little bit of an egg wash which is just one whole egg beaten with a couple teaspoons of water and we'll brush that over and then last but not least a very light dusting of Parmesan cheese and as I mentioned earlier we're only going to use the best ingredients for this so we will be going with the parmigiano-reggiano and we don't want too much here just a light dusting which is going to add a little bit of flavor but more importantly an amazingly beautiful golden brown color and at this point our calzone is ready for the oven but let me give you one quick tip first which hopefully will help prevent your smoke alarms from going off because our ovens at 500 sometimes that excess cornmeal and possibly parmesan on the pan will burn so what I like to do is take a second and just sort of brush off that excess with a paper towel and I know some of you are thinking hey I took the batteries out of my smoke alarm in the kitchen a long time ago but that is incredibly dangerous and not recommended so do this instead and at this point we can go ahead and transfer that into the center of a 500 degree oven for about 15 minutes or until it's beautifully browned and looks something like this if everything's gone according to plan this should be visually stunning and then let me burn myself a little bit here so you can see how beautifully that bottom browned oh yeah and by the way you're always going to get a little bit of juice that comes up through the holes of the top and then burns on to the bottom of the pan which reminds me do yourself a favor and put some parchment paper down on the pan first I mean I'm not looking forward to cleaning that or at least I'm not looking forward to telling an intern they have to watch that and then here's the deal if you want to eat this right away you can but you're going to need a fork and a knife but personally I like to cut this in half and eat it with my hands which in that case we're going to want to let this rest at least 10 minutes and of course the international symbol for this pan is hot is a towel placed on the corner make sure you practice that and teach everyone in your household that especially the kids but anyway I did let mine cool about 10 minutes and then I served it up because I would rip the lunch special mine came with a small side salad as well as a little spicy marinara for dipping I will assume that's not traditional and that's it I believe we've successfully navigated the highway to the calzone zone I would like to at this time apologize to Kenny Loggins and his entire family but anyway that looks too good not to dig into and like I said when we took this out of the oven if you want to serve this right away you can but that molten hot filling is going to be very very runny so I do like to let my cool little so I can use a bear hand delivery system so let's split that in half and take a look that fillings still nice and hot but not runny and we have that gorgeous creamy cheesiness from our sheep's milk ricotta which you really should try to find and then not one but two kinds of ham and you can do it with just one or the other but I really do find this much more interesting if you use both and while I do like to eat mine by hand there is no shame in your game if use a fork I mean this is not like pizza you use a fork for pizza you should be put in jail but anyway that's it my take on the old calzone which I believe in Italian means hot pocket I could be wrong but I think that's what it is so like I said we'd had a ton of requests for this recipe and I just hadn't gotten around to filming it but hopefully it was worth the wait so I really do hope you give this a try head over to food wishes comm for all the ingredient amounts and more info as usual and as always enjoy you

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 2,778,599

Rating: 4.8674407 out of 5

Keywords: Calzone (Dish), Food (TV Genre), Cheese (Food), Ham (Food), Pizza (Cuisine), Cooking, Recipe, chef, john, foodwishes, Italian, Italian Food (Industry), Kitchen, Restaurant, Recipes

Id: le9ILVh1okM

Length: 8min 45sec (525 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/kingwi11]

Chef John is a fucking pimp. He makes The Pioneer Woman and Barefoot Contessa look like amateur porn. Would Chef John tap that? Not only had he tapped your strawberry rhubarb but also tapped your mom in the process.

[u/[deleted]]

Ben Wyatt would approve! http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1656140/thumbs/o-BEN-WYATT-facebook.jpg

[u/adempton]

Yes!! I've always wanted to make my own calzone! Thanks for this!

[u/flaker111]

great videos but everything is spoken like a question