Tag Archives: pizza dough

CELEBRATE WEDNESDAY WITH HOMEMADE CALZONES!

Posted in Breads, Celebrate Wednesday, Weekend Dinners by

baked111Do you think it would be too hard to enjoy calzones made from scratch right in the middle of the week?  Trust me, it is doable with just a little bit of advance prep.  First, the day before (or early in the morning), make your favorite pizza dough.  Place it in the fridge.  Also the day before, prepare the fillings, and reserve in the fridge, right next to the dough.  When you arrive home from work,  take the dough off the fridge and let it warm a little as you heat the oven.   Roll the dough out, add the filling, close the calzone, and bake!
ingredients

SPICY CHORIZO CALZONES
(from The Bewitching Kitchen)

1 recipe for pizza dough (click here for my favorite)
3 chorizo sausages, casings removed
1 can (14.5 oz) diced fire roasted tomatoes
1/2 Tbs olive oil
1 box (10 oz)  frozen spinach, defrosted, squeezed dry
1 cup ricotta cheese
1 egg
salt and pepper
1 cup mozzarella cheese, grated
egg wash (1 egg beaten with a little water)
homemade tomato sauce to serve alongside (optional)

Prepare the dough the day before or early in the morning.  Place it in the fridge until dinner time.   Make the filling:  heat the olive oil, and add the chorizo sausage, crumbling it into pieces. Saute the sausage until it starts to get browned, drain the diced tomatoes, and add to the sausage.   Reduce the heat, cover the pan and cook for 5 minutes.  Let it cool, and place in the fridge.

Remove the dough from the fridge, cut it in four pieces, and turn the oven at 400 F.  Squeeze as much water as you can from the spinach, add it to ricotta cheese, season with salt and pepper, add the egg and mix.

Roll out each ball of dough to a 7-inch diameter round.  Add a little bit of sausage mixture, the ricotta/spinach, and grated mozzarella.   Fold the dough over,  pinch the edges to seal, brush the surface with egg wash. Cut three slits with a sharp knife, place it in the oven.  Bake for  25 minutes until golden brown.   Serve with tomato sauce and a salad, and you are all set!

ENJOY!

to print the recipe, click here

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These will turn any dinner into something special and festive, and they are sooo easy to make!  I used a very spicy chorizo, but the ricotta mellowed it down quite a bit. Sometimes I do not add any egg to the ricotta, but in this version I did, to make sure the filling would have a bit more body. If the filling is too liquid, the bottom of the calzone might get soggy.  Of course, this is a perfect recipe to improvise, coming up with different ingredients: sautéed mushrooms, black olives, a little Gorgonzola cheese, artichoke hearts, anything goes!

doublet111I like my calzones either plain, or with a little bit of tomato sauce, but others are known to go for the kill… 😉

I am submitting this post to Susan’s Yeastspotting…

ONE YEAR AGO: Plum-Glazed Duck Breasts

TWO YEARS AGO: Holiday Double-Decker

THREE YEARS AGO: New York Deli Rye

MELLOW BAKERS: PIZZA! PIZZA!

Posted in Breads by

My second recipe for the month of June in the Mellow Bakers Challenge is Hamelman’s pizza dough. I was anxious to try this one, to compare it with my favorite recipe, that you can find here. Hamelman’s dough uses a biga – a pre-ferment of flour, water, and yeast – that is incorporated in the final dough, together with a small amount of additional yeast. Apart from that, the recipes are quite similar.

Last week we had a small pizza party at home, and Hamelman’s method was put to the test. It passed with flying colors, or… should I say… ballooning colors!

In the Summer, we avoid turning the oven on, so we use our grill as an improvised oven, placing unglazed tiles over its grids, and cooking the pizza on them. This is not a grilled pizza, simply a regular pizza baked inside the grill. Once you get the temperature right, it works like a charm, each pizza will be ready in about 7 minutes. My husband was the one who had the idea for this “oven-grill-method”, yet another evidence that I won the jackpot when I married him.

So, what’s the verdict? This dough deserves to share the first prize with my default recipe – excellent texture and flavor. The only thing that prevents me from placing it ahead of Fine Cooking, is the 2 hour rise with a folding cycle after 1 hour. That makes it slightly more complicated to have pizza on a weeknight. But, it is a minor detail, and I will definitely be making this recipe again and again during the weekend.

I remind everyone that we are not supposed to share the recipes for our Mellow Bakers Challenge, so if you are interested, consider buying Hamelman’s book “Bread”, where all these recipes will be waiting for you… 😉

That evening, we made 8 pizzas, this one was particularly tasty: sauteed cremini mushrooms, roasted yellow bell peppers, and smoked mozzarella. Pizza parties are a lot of fun!

Many Mellow Bakers have already enjoyed their pizzas, if you want to see their report, jump here.

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One year ago: From Backyard to Kitchen….

TROUBLE-FREE PIZZA DOUGH

Posted in Breads by

Believe me, I’ve tried plenty of recipes for pizza made from scratch. But I always return to this particular version from Fine Cooking magazine.   The dough comes together in minutes in a food processor, and even though I’m a huge advocate for making dough by hand, once I tried this method, I was sold.

EASY PIZZA DOUGH
(from Fine Cooking, issue 49)

1 package (2 + 1/4 tsp) active dry yeast
1 +1/2 cups very warm water (110F)
18 ounces all purpose flour (4 cups)
1 + 1/2 t salt
2 T olive oil

Measure the water in a pyrex bowl, sprinkle the yeast on top, and mix gently to dissolve. Add the flour and salt to the bowl of a food processor and process for a few seconds to mix well.  With the processor running, add all the water/yeast mixture. Process for about 5 seconds, open the lid and add the olive oil.  Close the processor again and mix for about 20 seconds longer.  You want the dough to form a tacky ball, but don’t over process it or it may get too hot.

Remove the dough from the processor, knead it a few times by hand and form a ball. If you want to make a  large pizza, leave it whole. If you want to make individual pizzas, quarter it, place them in a large plastic bag and refrigerate until ready to use (from a few hours to a couple of days).

Remove the dough from the fridge 1 hour before shaping the pizzas.  Roll it out with a floured rolling pin, top with your favorite home-made tomato sauce, and the toppings of your choice.

ENJOY!

to print the recipe, click here

Comments: One of my favorite gadgets is a measuring spoon from King Arthur’s Flour, that holds the exact amount of a standard American package of yeast.  I buy my yeast in bulk, so having that spoon saves me a lot of time.

pouring

Sometimes I vary the flour composition of the dough, by including some whole wheat flour (regular or white), or some spelt flour in the mix. Usually I add only 1/8 of the total amount (1/4 cup, keeping the remainder as all purpose flour).  The overall process will be the same, add them to the bowl of the food processor with a little salt, and move on…  Once it gets into a shaggy ball, not quite cleaning the side of the bowl, it will be done…

ingredientsdough

The dough is very smooth, a pleasure to work with… divide it into four balls and place it to rise in the fridge, slowly… for several hours

dough2 4balls

Some people like to get artistic with the toppings….  😉

assembled

We make our pizzas on the grill, using it as an oven – an idea from my beloved husband that works very well. We place quarry tiles (6 of them from the Home Depot) on the grill and turn the gas as high as it will go. The pizzas  sit on the tiles, still on some parchment paper.  After a few minutes remove the parchment paper, and cook the pizzas in direct contact with the tiles until ready – about 8 minutes total, depending on the heat of your grill.

ready2

BBA#25: PIZZA NAPOLETANA

Posted in BBA Challenge, Breads by

pizza2

I was looking forward to this recipe, because for years I’ve been making pizza dough from a recipe published in Fine Cooking;  the BBA Challenge gave me the impetus to try something different.   Interestingly enough, my usual method is similar to Peter Reinhart’s, but it takes a little less olive oil, and is made in seconds (literally) in the food processor.

Reinhart’s recipe uses a regular mixer (or hand kneading) to make the dough, that then goes into the refrigerator for 1 day.  Two hours before making the pizza, he brings the balls of dough to room temperature.  In the book you’ll see a photo of Peter himself throwing the dough up in the air like a pro. I was looking forward to giving it a try, but my dough was just too uncooperative.   As I prefer to avoid  wearing the food that I’m cooking, I stretched it with my hands instead. 😉

Without further ado, some pictures of my pizza adventure!

The dough is supposed to stick to the bottom of the mixer, never clearing it completely…

dough1

I made four balls of dough with the full recipe….

dough2

And after spending the night in the fridge, they came back for a final rise at room temperature…  very soft and bubbly-looking…

ballsdough

Some of the ingredients we chose: mushrooms, tomatoes, black olives, sliced ham, fresh basil…  plus the usual suspects (homemade tomato sauce & mozzarella cheese)

ingredients

Ready for the oven, a mushroom and black olive concoction….

readyoven

The pizza was good, but both me and my resident food critic prefer the Fine Cooking recipe, which I’ll describe on my blog in the near future.

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I should point out that most of the bakers loved this recipe, and you can check two of them at these links:

for “The Other Side of Fifty”, click here….

For TxFarmer and her take on a pine nuts pizza, click here….

Twenty-five recipes down, only eighteen to go!